First off, here's an abbreviated quote from Chartreuse explaining why he organized the New Orleans trip--asking the question, "Can citizen journalists do a better job than regular journalists?"
"We are living in a world of Institutional collapse. And one of the things crumbling is journalism. Does anyone really trust the news anymore? Does anyone really believe it? ... People believe their next door neighbor and their mom. If middlemen are being kicked out of every other industry why in the world would anyone think the news business is any different?"Next, New Orleans blogger WestBankGuy weighed in with more collaborative question: "Shouldn't bloggers use the tools of journalism?"
"You can also do what I did a lot of in the sixth months after Katrina, tying together different MSM stories and waving them together into a coherent picture. Doing this relies on the cred and professionalism of the sourcing news media.
"If we try to write from scratch and don’t pay attention to our own credibility, we diminish the value of blogging/citizen journalism. The basics are so simply–verify facts, use at least two corroborating sources, don’t go off half cocked just to be first or because something pisses you off..."
Finally, Adrastos in New Orleans weighed in with a totally new question: "Aren't local bloggers and citizen journalists the best source of news?""[T]he NOLA bloggers I link to: we're the *real* team New Orleans. The artist formerly known as Ray in Austin, summed up my reaction when he wrote:'The east and west coast blogerati are finally going to bring civilization to us ig'nant natives down on the bayou. As if there aren't over a hundred local and ex-pat bloggers already down here, some of whom (including myself) have been blogging about this disaster non-stop since Katrina first entered the Gulf of Mexico.'"
I'm flummoxed.
In the old days, I would have joined a magazine and convinced my editors to send me to the places I wanted to write about. I don't have one of those scarce jobs, but I want to write the stories that matter most to me.
What should fledgling non-fiction writers without magazine jobs do? Should we become citizen journalists? Should we only tell stories about our communities? Or should we give up?
Don't give up. This is an attempt to do something new. So you get some resistance, are you surprised. Follow through and it will either work or it won't and hopefully you'll learn something either way. Nothing will change if you get put off by the naysayers.
Posted by: Mr Angry | August 11, 2006 6:12 PM | Permalink to Comment