Comments on: Citizen journalism returns, but is it making the same mistakes? AllVoices tours the UK

By: Max Harrington

Max Harrington — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 18:56:29 +0000

I feel the idea fit well with the ideology of the site. They offer the possibility to create a good profile and permit to students to try themself. On the other hand, as Paul said, the problem is that journalists aren’t trained to be part of a community.
http://www.tipao.com/ is another kind of citizen information not as famous as allvoices but with a good potential.

By: faxina de links « Monitorando

faxina de links « Monitorando — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 09:16:52 +0000

[...] O jornalismo cidadão retorna, mas produzindo os mesmos erros? – do blog do Paul Bradshaw [...]

By: Paul Bradshaw

Paul Bradshaw — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:33:10 +0000

Thanks for responding, Kathy – as I said below, perhaps the biggest problem is that journalists aren't trained to be part of a community, so in that sense perhaps social work students or art students, who have strong communities, might be a better bet.

By: Paul Bradshaw

Paul Bradshaw — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:45:13 +0000

Thanks for responding, Erik. I think a fundamental problem as well is that student journalists write like journalists, not like members of a community, and if the objective is to build a community, the typical closed-ended style of journalism students will not generate as much conversation as those who haven't been 'trained' to be objective, etc.

By: Erik Sundelof

Erik Sundelof — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 08:44:32 +0000

I do believe that students will have a very good outcome of contributing to allvoices, yet I do understand your comments. Will they still have to be proficient in all other aspects of the media production? Of course, we just make their life a lot easier at first. I therefore do not think this would make it harder for the students to get a job. What students need is practice and allvoices fills a gap here and provides them with a possibility to explore and create a readership yet get the carrot of getting compensated for it. My take with some perspective from the questions they raised are in short that the students were unused to the concept of an open platform weaving multiple perspectives to each post via aggregation, community and reputation, but also that they were unaware of the issues faced with human editor-driven validation we have seen lately. These issues only accentuates when you go into the long-tail content market, which calls for another solution. I really believe allvoices with the three component validation is unique here as for simplicity of understanding it and also that is very easily scalable by machines. The key in the future of media is to understand we have to innovate in all parts of the process and to be open minded about we have to change the process as well as open in what way. We have to take it to a new level, a new more exciting level in my eyes. We have the tools, we just need the guts to take the leap. I really enjoyed your thoughts here in your blogs about the the news diamond. It really shows what needs to happen in more than one way.

By: Kathy Jacobs

Kathy Jacobs — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:47:01 +0000

As the community guru over at allvoices, I would love to comment on what you have to said, Paul. While I agree that at first glance, student journalists may not appear to be part of our target audience, I feel they fit well with our site. We offer them a unique opportunity: Put your stuff on our site. Create a good profile. Post good content (text, images, videos, and comments). Learn to edit yourself via what you put on the site. Then, share your profile link with the "traditional" media as you apply for work. Citizen journalism gets us only halfway there. The other half of the equation is the community. We have specifically set things up to be content neutral. The members of our community decide what to post. They decide what gets to the front page – the more views and voices attached to an article, the more visible it is. To me, it doesn't matter who you are. Have something to say? We want to hear your voice. We want to share your news. We want to know what you think. We want YOU in the conversation.

By: Web 2.0 journalism requires editors | Solution Journalism

Web 2.0 journalism requires editors | Solution Journalism — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:20:38 +0000

[...] Paul Bradshaw, writing in a post titled, “Citizen journalism returns but is it making the same mistakes?” offers an excellent summary of the three principles of editing that the site AllVoices is using. He notes that There are no human editors, but a very well thought out filtering process that decides which stories make the homepages. [...]

By: links for 2008-10-09 — contentious.com

links for 2008-10-09 — contentious.com — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:00:53 +0000

[...] Citizen journalism returns, but is it making the same mistakes? AllVoices tours the UK (Online Journ… "Citizen journalism works best when the citizens don’t have a voice. Interestingly, while the rest of the world talks about hyperlocal, AllVoices’ generic ‘global’ strategy may have something in it. Citizen journalism site OhMyNews was a massive success in South Korea, largely because of a homogenous press and a looming election; Pakistan appears to have similar conditions for ‘citizen media success’ – and AllVoices has been flexible enough to become a useful tool to that population at that time. Could it repeat the performance in other countries at similar periods? Possibly. But when OhMyNews hasn’t repeated its success internationally, this is clearly a tough nut to crack." (tags: international global citizen+journalism business tidbits+fodder) [...]

By: Paul Bradshaw

Paul Bradshaw — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:05:35 +0000

A good journalist is a citizen journalist, but most journalists are not good journalists. Likewise, even fewer student journalists are good journalists. After all, journalists write about most things not because they're passionate, but because they're paid. That has its advantages and disadvantages. Oh, and it's Pop Idol over here.

By: SpaceyG

SpaceyG — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:44:00 +0000

Love this line: "Student journalists are not citizen journalists." lol. At some point in their "careers," or what they perceive to be "careers," whatever those are nowadays, they WILL be citizen journalists. Otherwise, they're just that…. mere careerists. It's the inherent, artistic difference between, say, Neil Young and American Idol bullshit. (Don't know what your UK equivilant of American Idol would be, but I'm sure you have one.) A student's personal use of new and varied mediums, or not, will sniff 'em all out. Eventually. Same sentiment essentially as to why I would never hire someone who wasn't blogging. And you go into that some as well above. Could use some fleshing-out. I see another blog post on the matter in my future. Or can I just Twitter it. (Twitter is making me VERY lazy.)