Week 6-----New Media Ecosystem

Group Members: Ayesha Zafar, Gobi. T, Shirin Sodhi, Sumran Bhan.

The article called "Is CraigsNews' Coming Soon" written by Eric Hellweg was published in the MIT Technology Review on May 19, 2005.Hellweg's article is a poingnent display of how new media has transformed mass media, has collaborated with mass media and has over-taken mass media.

It directs our attention to an emerging phenomenon in news that is developing on the web. This phenomenon is called "collaborative citizen journalism (CCJ)". The discussion of the article focuses on the development and ever-growing popularity of this news genre. It gathers a list of the most popular sites and gives a brief overview of each.

CCJ is news that is gathered, written, edited, critiqued and published by a group of ordinary citizens. It is an on-going process where participants can contribute without the limitations of publication deadlines and pressures of news editors. CCJ is so far falling into three distinct approaches, which are:

Lccal news approach e.g Backfence.com

Broader Focus Approach e.g Oh MY news or WikiNews

Community-based media-vetting efforts e.g NewsTrust

This emerging phenomenon, which a cousin of blogs, is creating a new media ecosystem.
This ecosystem will play a complementary role for the main stream media rather than displacing it. A journalist, John Hiler brings the attention the importance of CCJ for the main stream media by using the analogy of food chain.

Weblogs and collaborative journalists publish an event or story at a grass root level. As most of the blogs are interlinked and many mainstream journalists keep track of these blogs, a new story emerges at the mainstream level. Again CCJ do the fact verification, filtration of the published story. CCJ is adding diversity to the content and fact verification can make or break the future of CCJ.

Image from Microcontentnews.com

Questions:

• Who will be responsible for the sysnthesis of news in blogosphere?
• Will the diversity of content and point of view presented by CCJ be any good for society or will it be just "news overload"?
• Will these sites catch the eyes of masses or will they create "more aware elites?