Community Funded Reporting
The potential of social networking for news, through community or independent journalism, is vast. However, there will be a gap in in-depth investigative reporting if professional organizations with funding no longer dig deeper into stories. This isn’t to say that the mass media are fulfilling this entirely. I’m skeptical of the news industry in its current form. The same wire stories are plopped into every local paper, the papers reprint articles from other papers and quote one another.
I miss the imagined days of real reporting: muckraking and breaking huge cover ups. Maybe it really happened the way I imagine it, but it certainly doesn’t happen enough now. There are some magazines out there willing to spend the money to investigate a topic over a long period of time to get to the guts, but that’s happening less and less. Despite the drawbacks of the mass media, the public taking control doesn’t yet offer a full alternative. There is only so much we can tell one another through word of mouth and without taking time out of our lives to get first-hand information. Certain individuals, or groups, will need to become amateur reporters and spend significant amounts of time and energy covering the news.
One thing that gives me hope for the future of community journalism is the development of spot.us—a 2008 winner of the Knight News Challenge. Spot.us is a news version of the UK trend to publicly fund musicians so they can make their own albums, like sellaband.com. It’s a way for a reporter to bring an idea to the public and let them decide if it’s worth covering. The articles that get funded get written, edited, and distributed.
A community-focused social network like this fills the void and levels the playing field. Amateurs and professional journalists alike will be able to apply for funding, and we the people will be able to choose what gets investigated in our communities. We Media, most definitely.