Citizen Journalism is What Happens When the Letters To the Editor Section Storms and Occupies The Front Page
May 4, 2006Josh Marshall: “most media outlets are simply not used to getting any sustained feedback or criticism from their consumers. The crushing meaninglessness of old style letters to the editor? Please. It’s a spigot that can be turned off by non-acknowledgement.” The People Formerly Known as the Audience want to become peers in a meaningful way. This doesn’t mean they don’t value journalists or journalism — it just means they want to have a two-way conversation with them.
Most brilliant experiment: The Greensboro News & Record’s addition of a comments section underneath the online version of each letter to the editor. You know when you’ve got a successful blog when your readers use your comment section as a place to hang out and talk to each other more than they want to talk to you. N&R has accomplished it with one stroke.
My friends in media who are pursuing “blog strategies,” harken ye: Forcing people to blog is like forcing people to bowl. It’s cruel and it freaks out the other bowlers.
Jack Beatty, Victor Navasky, and Robert Kuttner on The Role of Journals of Opinion. There’s sure to be something about blogs in the audio of this talk which will be posted later this week. Hat tip to Pheonix media critic and blogger Mark Jukovsky.
Kris Krug and Roland Tanglao of UrbanVancouver.com are giving a talk. (Kris and Roland work at Bryght, an online hosting service for community sites. I use them to make H2otown, my community/news site for Watertown, MA possible. H2otown now hosts over 300 blogs by local residents which are aggregated onto the front page.
Lone blogger Betsy Devine has been doggedly following “PhoneJammer Gate,” a story that dropped from the headlines nearly two years ago. During the 2002 statewide elections in NH, the GOP funded a dirty-tricks campaign to use autodialers to jam phones at the state’s Democratic Headquarters on the day that they were launching get out the vote calls. Four Republican operatives have been indicted or convicted, and Betsy has been driving to her home state of NH from Cambridge, MA, to observe the trials and report them on her blog.
