tiistai 6. syyskuuta 2005

Everyone is a journalist

When man bites dog, who's the first to report it? Don't assume it's your local paper, YLE or MTV3. These days, "our man on the scene" is often a swarm of amazingly prolific nonprofessionals posting up-to-the-minute stories and pictures of breaking news from their laptops.

Their amateur dispatches vary wildly, from small-town sites tracking potholes to some 40,000 "citizen reporters" filing stories for half a million daily readers of South Korea's hugely successful OhmyNews.

Even the pros are turning to indie operators for help. After the London blasts in July, the BBC relied on bush-league shutterbugs with digicams and cell phones to assist with its coverage. Here's the lowdown on the new proletariat press.

There's more online than bloggers. Wikinews, an open source site, relies on hundreds of volunteers to pull together headlines, stories, and pictures each day. And don't get too hung up defining who's a journalist.

"Most people are perfectly capable of - and will at some point do - an act of journalism," says Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People.

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