On Mar 19, 2007, at 12:01 PM, Doyle Saylor wrote:
What I thought interesting is how Gannett is shifting their news rooms to a new model of a news room.
The concept of "crowdsourcing" (the excellent term used by Gannett) is my own favored hope for a new democracy, one that eliminates representative democracy, which, as we all know, is easily purchased by corporate ne'er-do-wells. But there's a disconnect. Just as in this Pen-L forum where conspiracies or the lack of them are discussed, there is a disconnect: no matter what's discussed, 'tain't no direct link to test, correct or build on the outcome. As long as there's a man in between with a nylon screen to filter all the gold from the green (government and media corporatistas) nothing improves. Every few years I float an essay I wrote years ago in which I called for a refiguring of news collection, a refiguring based on what we learned from the Uncertainty Principle, to wit, reality is created by what we choose to measure. The simplest restatement in journalistic terms is that the story is the story because that's what you looked at (to the exclusion of all the other events that occurred at the same moment.) I believe that journalists have not adequately looked at this issue and responsibility. I look forward to a crowd-sourced, real time, peer-reviewed Democracy, even though the elite white male landowners who founded this American democracy were frightened to death of it. Dan Scanlan "Take them to the Hague. Impeachment isn't good enough!" -- Rodd Gnawkin
