Web Journalism

Rise of Grassroots Journalism

Went to a session on the Rise of Grassroots Journalism ... "Tech journalist, blogger, and author of the just-released book We the Media, Dan Gillmor makes the case that grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media's monopoly"

Gilmor is a print-media journo really, has been for a long time, makes most of his income there, and his blogging is is a relatively recent pursuit. However he had some interesting insight into how the big-media co's view grass-roots publishing and blogs.

He mentioned a number of topic areas where journo's actively pursue the opinion of well regarded bloggers before publishing their own articles, mostly coz its an easy way to get insight from others into a niche topic they themselves may not have the time or interest in mastering. And in fact that its often impossible to maintain that low-level knowlegde on may topics as an individual.

There was a lot of interest in whether big-media were alering their publishing ethics at all in response the this undergrond threat but Gillmor thought that wasnt really happening to a big degree, but that a bigger issue was the number of them taking sides politically (e.g. Fox News and the Republicans)

Dan recalled a number of anecdotes that hilighted the sort of effect that blogging is having on mainstream journalism and big media / tv neworks etc. One of the funniest tho was related to a conference he attended where there were a speaker (CEO of a major national Teleco who was sponsoring) was moaning about how difficult it was for them to survive and find funding.

As this particular company was a monopoly Gillmor started posting live to his blog how rich this sounded, ie how hard can it be to run a business as a monopoly. Next thing he gets an email from someone else who was following his conference blogging, the email mentions that said CEO had just recently sold $100m of the companys stock so Gillmor posts a link to the stock details.

Apparently the mood of the conference changed immediately, loads of other blog geeks were also following the posts and everyone suddenly lost interest in what these company reps where saying and this turned a little sour.

See Also: Web Publishing | Online Writing | Notes Index

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