Turning Categories (and Interviews) Upside Down

I will soon put out a call for people to help examine certain crowdsourced projects so we can see if there are certain patterns we can name. We've stumbled a bit over whether we are looking at citizen journalism projects versus crowdsourced journalism, intuitively drawing a line separating citizen-initiated projects from those initiated in newsrooms. That distinction still seems useful when it comes to organizing reporting, though ultimately we might find such projects aren't so different. Jeff Jarvis seemed to be making that point in an interview
with contributor Neal G. Moore, who runs NextNews, an aggregate blog dedicated to citizen journalism.

Moore was clearly interested in knowing how one of the exemplars of blogging sees citizen journalism and crowdsourced journalism in relation to one another, but Jarvis indicated impatience with the desire to make distinctions or rigidly categorize various projects. Fair enough. Rigid categories often cut off thinking and discussion, one of the raps against traditional journalism. Yet some categorization is necessary to get on with the work, and right now that is the spirit in which I think Neal and others are asking the question. I'm not convinced it's incorrect to examine citizen journalism and crowdsourced journalism separately -- easy conflation is as problematic as false dichotomies -- but I kind of like the way the Crowdsourced Journalism page is now listed in the new Topic Index as "Journalism gets Crowdsourced." A good inclusive way of describing a lot of different initiatives while we trying to understand what is really going on.

Neal, by the way, did the interview by email, and I hope he'll soon post some reflections on the experience. Email interviews are still new for many journalists. The view is email is best left for clarifying information, not the main conduit for interviewing. In some ways this concern mirrors some of the same apprehension with which journalists met the journalistic interview when it was getting integrated into regular practice in the second part of the 19th century. Media sociologist Michael Schudson, one of a handful of scholars who have written about the rise of the journalistic interview, has catalogued some of the skepticism people had about the method as a way to uncover truth. Among the issues debated then was whether to take notes. In more recent times, there were debates about taping; questions about the propriety of email and IM interviews are a logical progression.

Yet one benefit of email interviews that can't be overlooked is the way interviewer and interviewee can conduct an exchange that can document the trail of substantive ideas as well as tangents. Many journalists would rightly point out that email interviews allow people being interviewed to take more time to concoct answers and spin views. A more detached observer would say people have more time to be thoughtful.

Jeff Jarvis demonstrated how the rules are being turned upside down when he "scooped" us on our own interview by posting Neal's questions and his responses to those questions. Jarvis has invited people to expand or improve on the questions and answers. I'm hoping that the crowd will do some of that with the interview Neal filed here.