21st century media. Part 2. Distributed journalism

In my first article, I looked at the process of producing news, from the first report of an event to the organization of convenient consumption by the reader. In this article I want to look at the news search process and the role of journalism in the context of new media channels.


In the last century, three important things happened to the news industry:

• from the world of lack of information, we stepped into the world of information overload ;
• we moved from a world in which the government and businessmen needed media to spread information, to a world where they can spread it themselves ;
• we left the world in which citizens needed the media to obtain information, and found themselves in a world where every citizen has access to information and , moreover, can produce it independently .

In such conditions, a professional journalist can no longer serve as a simple processor and transmitter of information from the source to the consumer. The modern journalist should rise above the information .
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What does it mean? Two things:

• Reader can get commercial and official information from the network itself. Consequently, a journalist must find , disassemble / collect and check the readers' reaction to this information, analyzing blogs and other sources. With such an increased number of sources, the journalist will have to dig deeper, weigh the assessments more carefully, search for topics longer .
• Readers can independently analyze, report on something, speak online. Consequently, the journalist must develop the skills of managing a community of people in order to bring together bloggers and official sources, establish rules for the delivery and processing of information, and learn how to get information from this community on the most sensitive issues.

Both things include a lot of what I call distributed journalism.

Distributed journalism

Distributed journalism means giving up content for the audience . It means cultivating contacts , but not for quantity. It means an understanding of its audience, and sometimes - direct service to it, the execution of its instructions. Along with writing news, it means creating tools and systems so that others can write news.


Distributed journalist uses a whole set of tools to work with participants in the process of making news. To work with the “brains”, “voices” and “ears”, tools will be needed for monitoring and filtering, but for the “journalist on the occasion”, “health tools”, “techie” and “crowds” systems will play the most important role.

Participants of the news process, tracked with guns

• Brain. Journalists today actively use all kinds of experts. Usually, in order to get a comment from an expert, one had to contact professional organizations or educational institutions. However, this often meant that the expert belonged to a narrow group, the elite pursuing its own interests. New media have opened to the world a mass of independent experts in various fields of knowledge. Moreover, such an expert may have no official recognition at all. Nevertheless, his reputation is strong thanks to a wealth of personal experience or practice-based knowledge. A distributed journalist keeps track of such experts, subscribes to their RSS, quotes on occasion and provides data if they need to be consulted on any issue. Here, the following should be noted: if the media leads a distributed journalist who maintains his own blog, he will show his interest in a closer dialogue with the audience; and if it hires a prominent enthusiast with an excellent reputation for managing a site with user-generated content, it will encourage the audience to produce this content.
• Vote. New media allow anyone to publish their opinions, no matter how well-off it is. Unlike experts, the voice is good, exciting, witty, or funny. However, he may have no idea about the real nature of the described. Sometimes it happens, the voice creates interesting graphics, video or audio. Distributed journalist seeks out such voices and brings them to his company. If the voice cannot work for the company, the journalist actively makes hyperlinks to his materials.
  It should be noted here: if you can do it in such a way that by publishing something with you, the user automatically publishes it in their accounts on other sites, then you will thereby show him that you care about him, save his time and effort, and not just steal its content.
• An ear. Someone somewhere knows what is happening in some place, a group of people or in some area. Often this valuable information slips through the blogs and statuses of these people. The distributed journalist subscribes to the RSS or e-mail newsletter of these people, is added to them as a friend of Vkontakte and as a thank you at every opportunity refers to them as a source, or by participating in their fate in a different way.
• But do not forget about the "silent" . These people do not use the Internet, they do not have time for blogs, etc. A distributed journalist must make an effort to reach out to them, to make sure that their opinion is heard. To get such people, you can establish contacts with those who have contact with them, but at the same time use the Internet.

Participants in the news process, whose participation is supported by systems

• A journalist on the occasion is a person who stumbles upon a news feed, records video on a mobile phone, camera, or simply watches the event with his own eyes. You cannot prepare such people in advance, you will not teach them, you will not grow them up. But they themselves rush to the well-known media, they are attracted by a wide audience, brand, reputation. Therefore, it is very important to be just such a media so that when the city hall lights up in your city, photos and videos are sent to you.
  How to achieve this? You should be in touch, you should be trusted, you should be ready to pay for the content, you should try so that people can easily contact you (publish phone numbers and e-mail addresses, organize content download via the Internet), make sure that It is uploaded to other sites (Youtube, for example) in order to catch this content from there, and also because casual journalists do not always realize what scale of events they record. Finally, participate in the promotion and training of citizen journalism, so that your audience knows how to identify important events, take pictures of decent quality and always remember that it was you who taught her that.
• The useful bird points to typos, spelling, punctuation and factual errors. They correct mistakes and interfere with rampant on the forums. They improve the quality of your content by commenting, publishing useful links, putting tags (both inside and on external sites), rating articles.
  The most important role is played here by the system: the system of error reporting, the system providing the ability to leave a comment on the site, put a label or bookmark. You will benefit if the editors are not shy to accept amendments and thanks for that.
• A techie is someone who takes your news, announcements and other raw data and places them on Google Maps, who analyzes your content and counts the most popular materials, who creates the Vkontakte application or a special RSS feed, and sometimes just throws up a cool idea. Technicians can bring a lot of benefits and real creativity, but for this you need to open your databases for them, create special systems, API for this and provide assistance in solving technical issues.
• The crowd — people previously known as an audience — is not just a group of people who can talk directly to you now. One talk is not enough. You need to use the folksonomy so that this crowd tells you news feeds, throws up information, helps find sources, so that it becomes part of the news gathering process.
  I think there are two main types of projects that use the crowd. The first with its help facilitates the search for experts and information. The second simply uses the crowd as a workforce to perform small tasks such as processing large amounts of data, writing requests for information, organizing interviews. Systems that organize this process are very important, but it is equally important to develop systems that facilitate this work and identify the one percent of readers who do this work all the time.

Naturally, these categories are not necessarily presented in pure form. The brain can have a great voice, the ear can be helpful, and the crowd will tell someone a great news story to make him a journalist on the occasion. Investments in any of these groups should have a positive impact on others, not to mention the growing popularity of your media.

Paul Bradshaw
October 2, 2007.

From the translator:
The article was translated with the personal permission of the author. At his request, I indicate the address of the article directly in the text: http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2007/10/02/a-model-for-the-21st-century-newsroom-pt2-distributed-journalism/
I hope the administration of Habr will take into account the request of the author and forgive me a forced violation of the format.

Other parts of this article:
Part 1. Diamond news.
Part 3. Six questions after.
Part 4. Distribution of content in the new media environment.
Part 5. How to make money on journalism? Business models for new media.
Part 6. New journalists for new information flows.