Jan Schaffer
- “Going to bringing this back to participatory journalism, because this isn’t supposed to be about blogger dot com”
- “We were interactive before digital media” — Not conflict driven, participatory
- New media: speed, delivery, moving parts (“bells and whistles”….”more noise”)
- Participatory journalism: on people, connections, conversations…on attachment
- The story we are missing: not about blogs, but about media participation
- Media participation: not just telling the stories, but telling them
- This [US] election is about media participation: MoveOn.org, the “Dean Scream” remixes, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Outfoxed
- Story Making:
- Internal: Consuming stories people make
- External: Making stories people consume
- Internal story making: Individuals as news aggregators: people develop an internal sense of the news based on the input they get
- External story making: blogs, email, citizen media
- Future news: people constructing those stories. Not something you read, something you do
- Early civic journalism: town hall meetings, mock juries
- Confession: “I’m not a fan of blogs.”
- Not useful
- Narcissistic
- Niche
- Where they have the most utility:
- Beat reporters use blogs for stories that don’t merit inclusion in the paper
- Editorial boards can use blogs so that ed board members can be held accountable for their opinions and can explain them
- Showed online educational games and multimedia sites as a way of
making news and other information more accessible to the average person - Need
to build entry points, which means you build
attachments/relationships/audiences. Build connections and people
respond to that - “Blogs are the 50-foot view. Participatory journalism is the 5,000-foot view.”
Spider-man says: Snotty self-important journalist senses…tingling!