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How to succeed in the new world of pro-am journalism

As news organisations inexorably shrink along with their audiences, revenue, and staff, I believe that one way for journalism itself to expand is through collaboration with the communities it covers. I call this networked journalism, and a week ago I organised a conference on the topic at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism.

We gathered more than 150 news networkers to share best practices, lessons learned, and hopes for the future. These included collaborative, pro-am (professional-amateur) efforts to dig into local scandals; hyperlocal blogs; new and profitable print publications made up of citizens’ content. At the start of the meeting, I threatened to gong off any bashing of mainstream media or blogs — and I gonged only once. There was a new spirit of cooperation and learning in the air. Some of our lessons:

First, motive matters. Amateur journalists — like professional hacks — will not report just because editors want them to. Paying them helps. So does interest in purse-string issues.

Second lesson: print still has power. It fuels ego and pays bills. MyHeimat.de in Germany, NorthwestVoice.com in California, and BostonNow.com, all freesheets, found that publishing citizens’ reports and photos spurs them to contribute more; it gives them attention as well as respect.

Third: community brings cost. Jay Rosen of New York University runs an ongoing experiment in networked journalism at NewAssignment.net. The community there has reported a story on crowdsourcing for Wired magazine and is now reporting on the presidential race for HuffingtonPost.com.

Mr. Rosen found an ongoing coordination cost: volunteers need to be assigned, enabled, moderated, managed, edited, curated.

Fourth: the role of the journalist changes. Journalists need to become moderators and enablers, and journalism students should be taught management. Why? That leads us to the fifth lesson: nobody has a business model yet. More news organisations should be organising advertising networks among blogs and social sites and whatever comes next. If you want to succeed at being small, you probably need to be part of something big. And big media can bring value still — vetting of quality sites, sales effort, the trust of advertisers, promotion, and the data advertisers demand. It is time for much more of such bold business experimentation.

(Jeff Jarvis is a journalism professor at the City University of New York who blogs at buzzmachine.com)

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