Collaborative journalism
Encyclopedia
Collaborative journalism is a mode of journalism
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...

 where multiple reporters or news organizations, without affiliation to a common parent organization, report on and contribute news
News
News is the communication of selected information on current events which is presented by print, broadcast, Internet, or word of mouth to a third party or mass audience.- Etymology :...

 items to a news story together. It is practiced by both professional and amateur reporters.

Further Definition

Collaborative journalism involves the aggregation of information from numerous individuals or organizations into a single news story. Information is gathered through research or reporting, or added when readers examine, comment and build upon existing stories. Stories from the mainstream
Mainstream
Mainstream is, generally, the common current thought of the majority. However, the mainstream is far from cohesive; rather the concept is often considered a cultural construct....

 media are often built upon. Depending on the system of collaboration, individuals may also provide feedback
Feedback
Feedback describes the situation when output from an event or phenomenon in the past will influence an occurrence or occurrences of the same Feedback describes the situation when output from (or information about the result of) an event or phenomenon in the past will influence an occurrence or...

 or vote on whether an article is newsworthy. A single collaborative news story, therefore, may encompass multiple authors, varying articles, and ranged perspectives.

Professional
Professional
A professional is a person who is paid to undertake a specialised set of tasks and to complete them for a fee. The traditional professions were doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and commissioned military officers. Today, the term is applied to estate agents, surveyors , environmental scientists,...

 and amateur
Amateur
An amateur is generally considered a person attached to a particular pursuit, study, or science, without pay and often without formal training....

 reporters may work together to develop collaborative news articles, or mainstream media sites may gather amateur blog posts to complement reporting.

Collaborative journalists either contribute directly to stories, sometimes through a wiki-style collaboration platform, or build upon the story externally, often through personal blogs. Collaborative journalists develop or examine a story one piece at a time. This contrasts the deadline
Time limit
A time limit or deadline is a narrow field of time, or particular point in time, by which an objective or task must be accomplished.In project management, deadlines are most often associated with milestone goals....

 and completion-centered nature of traditional media. A story is built upon continually, and a popular story may receive daily updates. Through combined authorship, collaborative journalism is thought by some to offer an increased independence of thought and experience unavailable to traditional media .

Successful collaborative journalism projects require a participatory community with respect for content. Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText, has commented on wiki-style collaborative journalism:

"Most user-generated content isn't content, but conversation. Cultivating community is a decided practice. It boils down to the social contract you make with your readers-turned-writers. If they trust that their effort and words will be appropriated appropriately, while providing social incentives for participation, it can very well work."

History

Collaborative journalism emerged through the internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 in the early 2000s, and developed gradually through various online outlets. As examples, Wikinews
Wikinews
Wikinews is a free-content news source wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The site works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying "on Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an...

 was founded in 2003, and NewsVine
Newsvine
Newsvine is a community-powered, collaborative journalism news website, owned by msnbc.com, which draws content from its users and syndicated content from mainstream sources such as The Associated Press...

 in 2005.

Differentiation from Other Styles of Journalism

  • Collaborative journalism should not be confused with citizen journalism
    Citizen journalism
    Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal 2003 report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information...

    , which is practiced only by amateur reporters who develop stories by actively reporting, collecting, analyzing and disseminating news and information, often through blog
    Blog
    A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

    s on the internet.
  • It is not community journalism
    Community journalism
    Community journalism is locally oriented, professional news coverage that typically focuses on city neighborhoods, individual suburbs or small towns, rather than metropolitan, state, national or world news....

     or civic journalism
    Civic Journalism
    The civic journalism movement is, according to professor David K. Perry of the University of Alabama, an attempt to abandon the notion that journalists and their audiences are spectators in political and social processes. In its place, the civic journalism movement seeks to treat readers and...

    , which are practiced only by professionals:
    • In community journalism
      Community journalism
      Community journalism is locally oriented, professional news coverage that typically focuses on city neighborhoods, individual suburbs or small towns, rather than metropolitan, state, national or world news....

      , professional reporters focus their coverage on smaller communities, such as neighborhoods, suburbs, or small towns (rather than national or international coverage.)
    • Civic journalism
      Civic Journalism
      The civic journalism movement is, according to professor David K. Perry of the University of Alabama, an attempt to abandon the notion that journalists and their audiences are spectators in political and social processes. In its place, the civic journalism movement seeks to treat readers and...

       is the philosophy and practice of professional journalists and newspapers acting as participants within a community, rather than detached spectators.
  • Collaborative journalism is similar, but not identical, to interactive journalism
    Interactive journalism
    Interactive journalism is a new type of journalism that allows consumers to directly contribute to the story. Through Web 2.0 technology, reporters can develop a conversation with the audience.The digital age has changed how people collect information...

    , in which consumers contribute to a professional news story through commenting and conversing with the reporter.
  • Wiki journalism
    Wiki journalism
    Wiki journalism is a form of participatory journalism or crowdsourcing, which uses wiki technology to facilitate collaboration between users. It is a kind of collaborative journalism. The largest example of wiki journalism is Wikinews...

      is a type of collaborative journalism.

Link Journalism

"Link Journalism," a phrase coined by Scott Karp in 2008, is "a form of collaborative journalism in which a news story's writer provides external links
Hyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks...

 within the story to reporting or other sources on the web." These links are meant to complement, enhance, or add context to the original reporting. Jeff Jarvis
Jeff Jarvis
Jeff Jarvis is an American journalist. Previously he was a television critic for TV Guide and People magazine, creator of Entertainment Weekly, Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News, and a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner.-Career:Until recently Jarvis was...

, from the Graduate School of Journalism's new media program at the City University of New York
City University of New York
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...

, has said that link journalism creates a "new architecture of news."

Implementation

Collaborative journalism has been implemented in several different ways. Wikinews
Wikinews
Wikinews is a free-content news source wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The site works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying "on Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an...

, the "free-content online news source," lets any user edit or create a news story, similar in style to Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

. Several mainstream news sites have adopted a collaborative journalism approach toward news, through use of news aggregation. The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...

 has developed a political site which links to related content from other news sites. NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...

 links to local newspapers, radio broadcasts, online videos, and blogs on its local television stations' sites. The sites do not separate articles written by NBC staff and links to outside sources.
The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

 has introduced a Times Extra website feature which acts posts links to outside news sites. Commenting on the launch of Times Extra, Marc Frons
Marc Frons
Marc Frons is the Chief Technology Officer of The New York Times since July 2006. Since 2007, he has overseen technology and product development at NYTimes.com while continuing to be involved in broader digital strategy initiatives at the company. Before he joined The Times, Mr...

, CTO for Digital Operations at the New York Times, said:

“In the past, I think many news organizations were afraid to link to other Web sites out of fear that they might be sending people to an unreliable source or that their readers would never return. But those fears were largely misplaced and we’ve seen a much more open policy when it comes to pointing readers at useful content elsewhere on the Web."


Other sites exhibit collaborative journalism through aggregation. On the site NewsVine
Newsvine
Newsvine is a community-powered, collaborative journalism news website, owned by msnbc.com, which draws content from its users and syndicated content from mainstream sources such as The Associated Press...

, for example, wire stories from the Associated Press complement user-generated stories and blog posts. Reddit
Reddit
reddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down," which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.Reddit was originally...

and other news aggregation sites may also act as collaborative journalism sites, depending on where content originates.

Criticism

Collaborative journalism has received some criticism:
  • Some news stories require secrecy as they develop. Often sources cannot know that they are being investigated or reported on. When a single reporter investigates a person or organization, this secrecy is more likely to be kept. When news stories are developed collaboratively by multiple journalists, however, secrecy is more likely to be lost and the story jeopardized.
  • Quality of collaborative projects may be difficult to assess. Fact-checking may be difficult, as facts come from many different sources. Quality of writing and reporting may also differ among contributors.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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