Speaking at the International Online Journalism Symposium at UT Austin in Texas, Rachel Nixon, Global News Director at NowPublic.com talked about a new news cycle.
The ability of people to witness and report the news to their network – Facebook, Twitter, etc – creates a emerging news cycle, argued Nixon.
In the past, she said, someone would witness an event, tell a reporter, who would filter and process the information, before feeding it back to the public as a produced news story.
Now people can share with each other what they saw or experienced, but “90% of the time, these people are not journalists.”
Nixon wanted to dispel some of the misconceptions about the notion of “citizen journalism”: primarily the idea that amateurs would replace professionals.
The people who come to NowPublic do so to share, discuss and be part of a community.
“There is not an army of people who want to be deployed at the drop of a hat,” she said. Instead that are a multiplicity of voices that are speaking online.
She described so-called “citizen journalism” as a global intelligence network that can enhance professional journalism. The role of the reporter is to wrap themselves around this social media network.
Nixon explained how NowPublic has developed a tool called Scan, described as a listening engine for the live web, which aims to make sense of the wealth of information online.
She showed the early version of this tool and showed a mock-up of a new prototype that aims to add a layer of meaning to the stream of information in social media.
(Full disclosure: Rachel is also my wife).
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