My Readers Know More Than I Do
And How To Have The Time Of Your Life Knowing That Fact
Francine Hardaway interviews Dan Gillmor
Dan Gillmor is having the time of his life -- although he says he’s not making nearly as much money as he used to when he was a print journalist.
“It’s a joy for me to be able to work with the people I’m working with at Harvard and Berkeley. I’m surrounded all the time by people who are smarter than me, which is the best way to learn. We are in the early days of something important, and to be able to help it along—in, I hope, a good way--what more could I ask for?” says Gillmor.
Gillmor is working on the Center for Citizen Media, a non-profit organization affiliated with the graduate school of journalism at U.C. Berkeley and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He’s working on several different projects, writing, advising people, and making personal investments. He flies back and forth from coast to coast often enough to be hard to get hold of.
His most recent projects were a report put out by Lisa Williams at Placeblogger, a company he is advising, and a set of online modules for the Knight Foundation on Citizen Media Law project, aimed at helping people in the citizen media field understand, and navigate the legal system. The founding director is an attorney who worked in the general counsel’s office of The Washington Post.
Q: Tell me the difference between citizen journalism and crowdsourced journalism.
Dan Gillmor: Citizen journalism can be anything from a random act like someone taking a timely photo in a newsworthy situation and posting it to Flickr. And it could also be someone creating a community site that talks about community views in a useful way.
Q: Is crowdsourcing a way to eliminate bias?
A: We can’t get rid of bias, but we can deal with bias. We can disclose bias; we can look at different takes on an issue where there are different biases and use those to get additional information. For example, when I go to London, I buy at least two newspapers each day and the two papers I automatically buy are the Guardian, which has a world view that leans left and the Telegraph, which has a world view that leans right. And they both do excellent journalism, but they look at the world in different ways, most notably on the editorial page, but there’s a world view that comes through their selection. By reading both, I think I am able to triangulate on the majority of what’s actually going on. I’m using their world views to amplify and extend my view of what’s going on.
Q: Are you familiar with NewAssignment.Net?
A: What I see is that Jay [Rosen] has a pretty good handle on it and everyone is learning as they go, which is good.
Q: What do you think about the death of the newspaper, which has been widely reported in the blogosphere?
A: If newspapers die, and the best journalism that they do continues, then we won’t have lost anything, particularly if the journalistic ethos expands and becomes more vibrant. I care much more about journalism surviving than newspapers.
Q: How are people who embrace citizen media supposed to make money?
A: Business models are being developed for new forms of reporting. One way is to do very traditional things like sell advertising. There have been newsletters in the past that were for profit and became valuable in their own right. And there are many interesting ways that people can make money from blogs, only one of which is to make them into traditional media. Lawyers, economists, and others use their blogs as information and promotion sites for what they do in real life. They get real value from doing that.
People should not assume that the only way to make money with blogging is by selling advertising.
(Edited by Dorian Benkoil)
