January 4th, 2009
Question:Does Participatory Media Need Legacy Media to Break Stories into the Mainstream?
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I’m a big believer in the power of participatory media, and believe that citizen journalism and citizen activism will play an increasingly important role in business, development and government.
However, even for a die hard enthusiast like me, it’s almost impossible to ignore the reality that participatory news media has an interesting two way dynamics with legacy news media. Participatory news media (still) derives most of its legitimacy from legacy news media, even as it progressively hacks away at the power of legacy news media.
Consider this. Legacy news media — newspapers, television channels, and wire agencies — are still doing most of the first hand journalistic reporting. Bloggers, at best, have taken some stories that were “under-reported” in legacy news media and amplified them, sometimes through background research, so that legacy news media is forced to pay attention to them. This is especially true of online citizen activism.
Even in cases where bloggers have committed “acts of journalism”, and broken stories from a developing crisis scene, often in the form of photos or videos, such acts of journalism have relied on lagacy news media to reach the mainstream.
