Much has been written and debated about the changing media landscape and the future role of citizens' journalism.
The subject once again grabbed my interest in the summer of 2005 with the launch of several hyper-local news sites, some of which are no longer around. And I remained engaged through the fall, leading up to a fabulous panel at Columbia's School of Journalism. Executives representing Craigslist, NYT, WSJ, Providence Journal and a few others debated what was happening and what might emerge. There was little concensus then, and I'm not sure there is any more now.
At rBlock, we've had little time to keep up with it, and instead focused entirely on what features and tools are most useful to neighbors who share a block. I'm convinced though, that our model could incorporate a very special brand of citizens' journalism called residents' journalism. Three aspects to what we're doing address some major challenges for the future model of journalism:
- high clustering, where a large number of local readers and writers raises the quality and coverage of user-generated content;
- restricted distribution, making the content highly relevant;
- trust, without which quality, coverage and relevance have little meaning.
We'll be looking at this much more closely as we scale up our service.
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