Monday, October 10, 2011

Can The Public Really Help The Newsmakers?

A NEWSPAPER IN THE UK is now posting their story budget for the next day's paper, hoping that readers will see the story list and contribute to it.

Is this a good idea?

"What if readers were able to help newsdesks work out which stories were worth investing precious reporting resources in?" the national news editor of The Guardian wrote yesterday. "What if all those experts who delight in telling us what's wrong with our stories after they've been published could be enlisted into giving us more clues beforehand? What if the process of working out what to investigate actually becomes part of the news itself?"

Is this a bright move, inviting citizens to become active participants in journalism? Or is this a gimmick?

Is this a ploy to get citizens to do the actual legwork that journalists used to do?

The story list began running today. Check it out here.

2 comments:

Scott Samuel David Weiss said...

Scott S.D. Weiss
Tuesday 11 October 2011
In regards to the matter of whether the public can help the newsmakers, refer to the first Journalism principle: Journalism's main purpose is of the truth. The public seek facts, seek well-rounded, reliable, and interesting information. Most of the events reported in the news involve the public society.When the frightening motorcycle-car fire at Utah State in Logan occured in September 2011, the news quckly spread around the U.s>; moreover, the audience felt a sense of sorrow for the victim since he was not responding for a while, but this could happen to any citizen.
-Scott Samuel David Weiss
Temple Class of 2015
Possible Journalism Major

Alexis Wilkinson said...

I think it is an interesting idea to incorporate what the public wants to actually read, but I feel like it is more of a gimmick than anything else. We have learned that journalism is a business and more and more papers want to produce stories that will interest the public so they will buy the paper. Allowing citizens to pick the stories they want to hear will enable the papers profit to go up. It might also make the real journalists more lazy since they will be getting tips and help from the public.