During my trip to Australia, I was invited to deliver a keynote at the Screen Futures conference in Melbourne. In the talk, I explored the promise and practice of participatory journalism. It draws on the data from my co-authored book, Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. We found that journalists are navigating uncharted waters – figuring out how to bring in the audience into the professional process of

One of the final presentations at ISOJ looked at the content of comments. The study, Comments in News, Democracy Booster or Journalistic Nightmare (PDF), analysed comments on newspaper websites in Catalunya in Spain David Domingo, Universitat Rovira i Virgilli (Tarragona, explained that the analysis was based on Habermas: were comments an expression of a democratic debate, expressing logical and coherent arguments. Most users only left one comment in a debate.

An impression roster of speakers tackled the question of participatory journalism at International Symposium on Online Journalism. The session was introduced by Dan Gillmor, professor and director, Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Arizona State University, with an overview of the read-write web, from consumers to creators to collaborators. The question, said Gillmor, isn’t who is a journalist, but rather what is journalism. There is plenty of supply, but the

The BBC has long been leading the way in user-generated content, using photos and videos from the public in its reporting.  It has just launched two new participatory journalism initiatives. One is the appointment of an Interactive Reporter, Siobhan Courtney. On the BBC Editors blog, Matthew Eltringham, explains her “beat is simply all the content you’ve been sending in to us.” The appointment is welcomed but it is simply newsgathering

I have been at the ICA annual conference in Montreal this week, talking about the research that Neil Thurman and myself have done into “participatory journalism” in Britain. What follows is a shortened version of the talk by Neil Thurman and myself, but it is still on the long side for a blog post. The term participatory journalism is itself rather ill defined. We’ve taken it to mean the technical,

Interesting to see that the Vancouver-based participatory news site NowPublic.com is expanding its editorial team. It comes after the site received $10m in venture capital funding last year. It has post several job ads on its blog. NowPublic is looking for: Regional Editors – US, Australia, China, India, South Africa and the UK A sports editor A community relations and content specialist Applications are due by February 1, so please