Jay Rosen on:

Journalism in transition: The whole professional tribe of journalists has reached, in my view, a kind of migration point where it can’t live anymore on the land that it settled so successfully and it has to cross a big divide, a big sea. Like every other tribe that has ever had to migrate, journalists today have to face some very painful decisions and a lot of them don’t want to go. They have to decide what is essential to what they are doing so that they can try and transplant it, as it were, on the other side. Besides that, there’s lots of people already there building the digital world and they’re not exactly comfortable with that.  It’s a very critical time, it’s a very exciting time, it’s a very dramatic time. I see it as both crisis and renewal, because that’s what happens to people when they have to migrate. That’s the position journalists are in today.

Civic journalism: We’ve been trying to involve volunteers in the production of a single trend story. We tried that with wired.com. It worked ok; we learned lots of things that helped us design our next project.  For example, we had no trouble getting over 1,000 volunteers. We had more trouble figuring out exactly what we wanted them to do. We learnt that you have to start with the motivations of people who are contributing to your project, not with what you need done. So it completely fails to try and take a production task that your professional people are doing and just move it over to citizens. It completely fails. We learnt that of a thousand people who are interested in what you are doing, about 10 per cent of them will contribute any content at all to your project and about one percent of that group will end up becoming regular contributors, or reliable contributors, or what are sometimes called super contributors. So we learnt that, and we’re taking that knowledge and putting it into a project we’re running right now with the Huffington Post, which is called Off the Bus. It is an attempt to do citizen generated campaign journalism that is not ‘on the bus’ like the rest of the press, but Off the Bus.  So we’re just learning how to work with this distributed model, in which we have lots of writers, lots of people who know stuff and lots of people who are in a position to issue an accurate report or to give a view that we need.  And it’s journalism by the many, made practical.

Who will pay for journalism: I think that what people who want to get paid for this work need to do is figure out very quickly ‘how is value created on the internet’? And they have to take a crash course in that. And I think if they do, yes, they will be paid for their work. And I think another thing too. Rich people, powerful people, empire builders and empire kings have always had news systems. Those people will be informed and they will pay. The question is whether the public will gain the benefits of the press, because tyrants and captains and emperors always will.

A success story: TPM Media, which started as a political blog by a journalist in his thirties, named Joshua Marshall, began as a politicly engaged blog about items of the news by an intelligent liberalist journalist who also had a PhD in history and was very open to the web. What would happen is that he would get engaged on certain stories that really concerned him.  He would follow them very carefully with his blog, writing about them himself, giving his opinions, bringing what he knew to that story - but also following whatever was found online about it and developing through week by week a kind of online public for that story. At a certain point, people started sending stuff in about the story. Marshall built up a following and was soon able to hire other people to help him to do original reporting, and generating enough ad revenue to start creating sister sites. So he created TPM Muckraker just for investigative reporting, and he created TPM Café, which is his forum site where he has invited contributors to discuss the issues of the day. Then he created a miniature site just for press criticism - all the while building an audience. The way his news organisation works is people every day send in ton of stuff just through emails, from comment threads, from many different means, sometimes because Josh Marshall asks for it:  ‘Does anyone know anything about the United States attorney in Phoenix?’  Then a headquarters, as it were, filters all this incoming flow from a vast user base. Some of it is part of a story they’re following, some of it they spit back as news. By fixing on small number of stories to which they give intensive effort, they generate tonnes of information that can be intelligently filtered into stories and articles and posts. So what does an editor look like? It is the person at the wheel of that. That’s an editor. In-flow from the internet, synthesis, packaging and writing, and then pumping back out to the people who are informing you as you inform them.

Open source journalism: To run Off the Bus I ended up hiring as project director someone whose background was not in journalism, but whose skills were in online organising for political campaigns. That is what an open source or large citizen journalism project is, a hybrid of a campaign and an investigation. In a way you could say it is a campaign for a story or a campaign for news. And some of the essential skills are in understanding the motivations of your volunteers and why they might join up with you in the first place. You have to learn how to be efficient with large numbers of people. For example: can you return every single email? Well if you have a successful project maybe you can’t. But if you see the same thing happening and the same question coming up in your email, then you know it is time to write a blog post about it. By learning to be extremely efficient online and learning where our contributors are coming from – what they can do and what they can’t do, being realistic about what they can offer – and by allowing certain of them to emerge as highly motivated, as stars as it were, you gradually, piece by piece, you learn how to work in this environment. I know it’s hard for traditional journalists and news organisations to do that, that’s why I’m doing it from the outside, as it were. Because it’s very difficult for the legacy media to undertake projects like that. Open systems don’t work like closed ones do. I can’t tell you how important it is to start there.