As the news media seeks to restructure itself, it is becoming increasingly clear that citizen journalists reporting about their communities will be part of the solution.
In fact, the role of citizen journalists was included in a report on "The Reconstruction of American Journalism" issued Tuesday, Oct. 20, by Leonard Downie Jr., the vice president at large and former executive editor of
The Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, professor in the Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
While many issues are discussed in the lengthy report that was almost a year in the making, I want to focus on the narrow aspect of citizen and professional journalists working together. They called this "pro-am journalism - not just professionals or just citizen journalists, but professionals and amateurs working together over the Internet."
Seems I'm not the only person who believes citizens working with paid journalists will be part of the solution.
Downie and Schudson even cite quite a few examples of how this concept is working with some local and regional websites. Many of these websites are run by professional journalists who do some of the reporting, but who also rely on freelancers, bloggers, unpaid student interns and/or local citizens to supplement the news coverage.
Locally, of course, we have YourHub.com. But some of the other examples cited by Downie and Schudson were:
* The New West network of websites in Montana and neighboring states,
* The New Haven Independent in Connecticut,
* Next Door Media, a group of websites in the Seattle area that competes against neighborhood blogs begun by a local television station andSeattlePI.com, which was started after the closing of the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
* TheLocal, started by the
New York Times, and
* Patch.com, started by AOL.
I suspect the list will continue to grow. And I'm guessing citizen journalism - and even "pro-am journalism" - is here to stay.