Dina Rickman posed a question to me this week about the role of a reporter in our current networked age. I thought I’d expand on my response, shown above. Depending on your point of view, this is either a draft manifesto for networked journalists and bloggers – or a set of gaps in the market; new scarcities in an age of abundance. Here they are:

1. To verify & contextualise what’s online

• Because finding things to publish isn’t difficult – for anyone.
• Because the voices that stand out online are those that dig behind the statistics, or give meaning behind the headlines.
• Because curating context is as important as curating content.

2. To digitise what’s not online & make it findable

• Because in a networked world, information that’s not online is, to all intents and purposes, for most people hidden.
• Because journalists have always sought to bring hidden information to a wider audience – but in the networked era that’s no longer a one-way process. SEO, tagging, linking and social media marketing are just as important as publishing.
• Because online, information has a life of its own: adaptable, aggregatable, mashable.

3. To empower communities & make connections between

• Because the web is a tool as much as a channel.
• Because journalists have always been generalists whose strength is in making connections between diverse areas – in the networked era that role is reinvented as a connector.
• Because serving communities sometimes means looking out as much as looking in.

Any more?

There may be other principles you can add (I hesitate to add ‘telling stories in new ways’, but perhaps it should be there), or other reasons. Please let me know what you think they are, and I’ll update the post accordingly.

At the Blogboat event in Belgium citizen journalism expert Dan Gillmor spoke about a new book dealing with principles for news consumers, writes Dorien Aerts.

According to Gillmor, consumers should look at the news with skepticism and judgment. Moreover they should do research when something isn’t clear or when they need a second opinion.

“That’s exactly what the people who sold their stocks after hearing that Steve Jobs had a heart attack, didn’t do. It was their stupidity to immediately believe the false news. Which makes them responsible as well, and not only the citizen journalist who wrote the article.”

(When Googling, I found a lot of people blaming the citizen journalist who wrote the news (eg this one)).

The fourth principle mentioned by Gilmor is independence. He encourages news consumers to read stuff that challenges what they believe.

Last but not least Gillmor wants people to be aware of and recognize the techniques used by journalists to persuade them of something.

According to Gillmor, we are moving to the Daily Us (versus the Daily Me) or community driven news. Popularity and reputation will play the most important roles within that model.

“And whoever succeeds in combining those two, will be big”.

This Daily Us will be driven by thouroughness, accuracy, fairness, independence and transparancy, “Principles every journalist agrees on.”

In order to achieve this Daily Us, the participation of traditional media and the help of citizen journalists are needed, says Gillmor. But also parents and schools are of the utmost importance, in teaching children how to deal with news. “Children should know that Wikipedia is the best starting point, but the worst place to stop.”