I managed to grab a few minutes with both the Knight Center’s Dan Gillmor and BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones at yesterday’s Guardian Changing Media Summit 2010 to talk about the future of community generated journalism.
Rory Cellan-Jones thinks that “the place where citizen journalism is actually triumphing is Wikipedia”.
“It is becoming an instant news agency as well as a kind of journal of record and deep explanation of events, in a way the newspapers might find difficult to compete with.” But speaking as a journalist, he finds unpaid contribution based models, such as the Huffington Post’s, a “difficult” concept.
This and more (on Spotify and predictions for 2011) in this AudioBoo:
Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, and advisor to crowd-sourced site Spot.us, says there are questions to raise about unpaid models and sustainability. “People who run these sites should of course be fully aware there will be an ebb and flow of active users, that some people will start and then give up, and then some will be highly committed.” Citing fellow panellist iVillage network general manager Rebecca Miskin’s experience, he described how some unpaid community moderators eventually become paid employees.
Audio: Dan Gillmor on crowdsourced journalism: