Alfred Hermida on the promise and practice of participatory journalism
There's a good chance you didn't make it to the Screen Futures conference in Australia, but UBC journalism prof Alfred Hermida did. After all, the conference featured a talk based on his new co-authored book, Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. Now, he's offering a write-up of the talk's main points on his blog — and it's worth checking out.
There's a good chance you didn't make it to the Screen Futures conference in Australia, but UBC journalism prof Alfred Hermida did. After all, the conference featured a talk based on his new co-authored book, Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. Now, he's offering a write-up of the talk's main points on his blog — and it's worth checking out.
"For our book," writes Hermida writes, "We wanted to find out how far journalists were opening up the news process to the public at a time when digital technologies are creating opportunities for new forms of media participation, production and distribution on an unprecedented scale."
In doing so, Hermida visited more than a dozen newspapers in 10 Western liberal democracies.
"We found mixed feelings," he writes, "There was apprehension, confusion, fear and hope, among journalists who are experiencing facing a rapid and radical shift in their traditional power to oversee the flow of information."
From there his research found three approaches in the newsroom: conventional, dialogical, and ambivalent. For more on what that means, click on over to Hermida's post.
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