Cody Brown, an undergraduate student at New York University, on the board of college publishing organisation CoPress and founder of the NYU Local blog, reveals his new project, Kommons.com, with a long essay on the public’s relationship with news. A very brief extract:
“When I say ‘a public can talk to itself’ I mean that a public can be counted on to share and disseminate its own news. Online, what a public needs, far more than reporters or endowed professional newsrooms, is a way for everyone to do this more effectively.”
“At the moment, we are bootstrapping. Whenever big news breaks on Twitter and thousands start commenting and adding details/screed/spam to a story we get a sense of both how exciting it is to collaborate directly in news online and how challenging it is to design a platform that handles it properly.”