From Twitter Vote Report and Huffington Post’s Off the Bus project, to NPR’s crowdsourced Inauguration ’09 coverage and ProPublica’s new distributed reporting network and its coverage of the stimulus spending, a new kind of hybrid “pro-am” collaborative journalism is taking shape, one that is powered by a mix of professional journalists, savvy technologists and engaged amateurs. This session will feature several leading practitioners of this new net-driven approach, and I’m expecting the panel to get into some detail on how complicated these projects can be, and offer some “lessons learned” about what works or how to approach organizing such efforts.
As Ari Melber, the session moderator (and himself a pro-am pioneer with Ask the President), put it in a recent email to the panel, “we need to define the precise ingredients for successful networked journalism — what type of topics, participants and incentives work best, and what is replicable for audience members who hope to try this out.”
Barring any last-minute glitches, attendees of this session will also be among the first to get copies of a new in-depth study by the Center for Public Media at American University, written by Nina Keim and Jessica Clark, that looks closely at Twitter Vote Report and Inauguration ’09 as case studies in how to build social media infrastructure in engaging the public as contributors.
June 22, 2009