The communitization of news and remaining relevant

As newsrooms take their first steps into social media, as they work to extend their citizen journalism efforts and as notions of community begin to be a part of our internal conversations, it feels to many as though we embark blindly, with only our best guesses to guide us. And, to be sure, we don’t know precisely what form our industry will take going forward, what methods for news gathering and reporting have yet to be forged, or what roles many of us will play as the stage shifts beneath our feet. And yet, I feel confident in saying that what we’re moving towards could be called the communitization of news– that is, a model of journalism by which communities of voices, that need not be attached to any traditional news organization, are responsible in large part for the collection and dissemination of news.

How do we know this transition is upon us, that journalism will be wrested from our hands and that it could be placed into the care of anyone with time enough to put up a blog or start a Twitter account? The answer is simply that, if we can’t already see it in our own industry (though it should be plain enough), we can certainly see it in others. More than a decade ago, in his ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar,’ Eric Raymond noted the shift beginning in the software industry as a model we now call open source. More recently, Simon Phipps, Sun Microsystems’ chief open source officer, sees that shift as beginning to permeate all of society.

Pre-World Wide Web, most things that happened in the world were done on a hub-and-spoke basis where you’d have, for example, government in the middle and citizens on the end of the spokes. Or, you’d have industry in the middle and customers on the end of the spokes. I think the introduction of the World Wide Web has changed the basic topology of society from hub-and-spoke to mesh.

It’s not difficult to see our newsrooms as these hubs, passing out bits information to the spokes, our consumers, when we see fit and in a manner we deem best. And we’ve enjoyed our time as gatekeepers, with little or no competition, especially for local news, where few cities support more than one daily and FCC licensing has kept the number of television and radio players in any single market relatively low. But now the Internet has allowed our readers and viewers to connect to each other and share news and information with one another in ways never before possible. And that’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re forming a mesh of blogs, YouTube videos and tweets that circumnavigates the hubs of traditional journalism. They’re communitizing the collection and dissemination of news.

The mistake would be in clinging to our hubs, holding to a model quickly giving way, forcing it onto the Web. Trying to build your own social networking, video sharing or micro-blogging site, unless you have a really good reason to do so, isn’t the answer either. That’s really just hoping to reassert yourself as hub. These things already exist and have active communities. You needn’t start from scratch trying to build a community. Google, after all, didn’t buy YouTube because it couldn’t replicate YouTube’s technology. They bought it for its users, because trying to build a large scale community isn’t easy. Instead, we must first enter existing communities ourselves, lending our voices to the already ongoing conversations.

Start by posting quality comments on relevant blog posts, YouTube videos, and Flickr photos. Reply to local tweets on Twitter. Keep in mind, too, that, depending upon the community, you might need to spend some time building equity in your online voice, becoming a valued part of that community, before you publish. And the key, once you do publish, is to avoid treating these platforms as broadcast tools through which you simply re-purpose existing content. If all you’re doing on Twitter is using a tool like twitterfeed to push your headlines through as tweets, then you’re missing the point. On your own site, make sure you’re aggregating outside local content. Let the sites know you’re doing it, that you’re pushing traffic to them, because you see the value of what they’re doing.

In the end, that you’re a reporter, news director or webmaster with the leading station or paper in your market gives you limited initial influence. In many respects, we’re new to the Internet-as-mesh and will have to establish the validity of our contributions, just like everyone else.