Engage citizen editors

From Poynter's Jill Geisler :

This part of the CBS saga is a great reminder to newsgatherers: today there is someone out there who is completely versed in the topic you are covering, and that person is not only watching; he/she is wired.

That person is now part of an online community of other interested professionals. I'm not referring simply to politics here. I'm talking about anyone from locksmiths to window cleaners -- two examples I pulled from thin air and found instantly on the Web.

Time was, newsrooms were instantly fact-checked by a handful of groups, sometimes with a political point of view, sometimes simply hobbyists and aficionados. Gun owners, railroad buffs, retired English teachers ... we knew them fairly well.

Today, the Internet has brought countless communities of interest together. Some of them blog and some of them chat among themselves. They can connect with each other -- and with us -- using only a few keystrokes and the "send" button.

They are the citizen editors of our journalism.

We can't rush a story to print or air without extraordinary vetting. We can't do what CBS did and what the panel describes: fail to recognize the nuances of the field of document verification. That ignorance was at the heart of its flawed reporting.

You may have regular conversations in your newsroom about identifying experts, but what about discussions on how we deal with those "citizen editors" out there? Are they seen as cranks who fill your in-box with spam? Or are you finding ways to cultivate and catalogue these contacts, to build your inventory of experts?

Jan 15, 2005 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)

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