Jonathan Dube, the publisher of CyberJournalist.net, agreed that increasingly easy-to-use technology is encouraging a new generation of community journalists.
“Participatory journalism, or citizen journalism — the idea of people in the community actually gathering and porting information to other people — is a new and evolving concept that increasingly is becoming more common with the rise of the Internet and, in particular, the rise of tools like weblogs.”
….everyone seems to agree that the Web version offers the true glimpse into the future of community journalism. That’s because of the immediacy of the medium and the fact that any content that fits a publication’s standards can be published, unlike in the paper edition.
“The website is key to this,” said Dube, who wrote about the Voice project on CyberJournalist.net. “You could not possibly do something like this that involves the community without the Internet. It makes it extremely efficient to get all this information from these citizen reporters.”
Meanwhile, some may be surprised that such a groundbreaking project is coming out of a rural area of Bakersfield and not, say, San Francisco or New York. But not Dube, who thinks that large cities are not ready for such projects — and may never be.
“The whole idea of using the Internet to interact with the community better and to tap people as journalistic resources probably has the most potential not on the national level or even the regional level, but on the hyper-local level,” he said. “Because there’s such a keen interest among people who live in a small community for information about very, very local events, such as small school news, church news (and) youth sports scores. And those types of things are rarely covered well by mainstream media, primarily because mainstream media’s aiming at a much wider market.”
The Voice’s coverage is very much as Dube describes.
? Daniel Terdiman
