Casting a wider net

Network journalism, crowd sourcing, citizen journalism...whatever you call it, we're being warned 'it's coming, fast, and it's going to change journalism.'

These concepts exploit the web to gather news, information, and opinion from a range of people around the world, allowing journalists to quickly build a network of contacts with a variety of expertise, interests and regional knowledge.

But hang on...hasn't networking been used as a journalistic tool since the original pamphleteers?

From what I can gather, networked journalism is simply a logical extension of this process, the key advance being that it provides journalists the means to reach a larger, potentially global number of contacts at the press of a button.

Any journalist will tell you the most important tool they own is their address book. How they get in touch with those contacts is up to them, and largely a matter of convenience and personal preference.

But, the argument goes, these tools are 'democratising' the media, giving Joe the Plumber (who incidently, isn't a plumber) the chance to have his voice heard alongside the 'elite few' in the media. Which is all good and well, except that the vast majority of the public don't even have access to the web, and most who do use it to look at cats falling in fish tanks rather than reporting news.

The problem with the 'democratising' argument is that the people who are vocal online, tend to be the same people who are vocal in traditional media. I.e the campaigners, activists and 'retired Colonel from Tunbridge Wells', as Andy Williams pointed out in his lecture on User Generated Content. If anything it could be argued that this gives an even less impartial view of the news than traditional news outlets (with the possible exception of Fox News)

But, as Alison Gow points out on her blog, networked journalism doesn't just change the newsgathering process, it changes the dissemination process too. Sites like OhMyNews! and NowPublic (and countless others) allow readers to link to articles they find interesting, and share them with an audience they think will appreciate them too.

Rather than threatening the traditional role of the journalist, the use of networking in this way could in fact add a whole new dimension to it. For example, while reporters for regional media outlets will still keep their local audience as their priority, they'll also be aware that what they are writing could be picked up by global audiences who might in some way be affected.

According to Alison, network journalism could impact all aspects of journalism, changing the entire story gathering and telling process.

Whilst her description of the web 2.0 process emphasises the added benefits of using social networking, Twitter, blog translators and the like, I worry slightly that the focus on exploiting all of these tools may leave traditional journalistic values in the shade.

An (admittedly slightly pedantic) example can be found in step two of her revised lifecycle; while 'verification' is explicitly referred to in the 'old' style of researching a story, the 'new' step two instead relies upon crowd sourcing and blog translations to confirm the accuracy of an article. I admit I could be getting hung up on symantics here, but I think it points to a wider problem:

With all the crowdsourcing, online surveys, photo-sharing, social bookmarking, blogging, Dipity-ing, Twittering, pod-casting etc., is there a danger the traditional news values of reliability, accuracy and impartiality fall by the wayside?

Perhaps this will be the defining distinction between 'citizen' journalists and professional hacks.