Shameless self-promotion--click to read my Poynter.org tip

I am pleased that Steve Outing ran with my tip about YourHub and Ohmynews. He had an item about its print rollout yesterday, but I am glad to see the interest in how the editor-citizen journalist situation is evolving. The secret of many a good writer is the good editor behind them. I suspect that the citizen journalist editor role will call for more negotiation and also a broader vision of what is journalism. I see editors nudging citizen journos closer to journalistic standards like fact-checking, while the citizen journos nudge the editors to looking at "what's news" from more diverse perspectives. As Tom Rosentiel told Rick Edmonds in a "State of the Media 2005" report:

The new news forms are like "a free-flowing conversation with all the advantages and disadvantage that implies," Rosenstiel writes, compared to the lecturing-at-you format of old media. Blogger activists, he predicts, will force traditional media to be more transparent about their sources and to hold themselves to higher levels of proof. They may even be drawn into refereeing debates that begin in the non-traditional media.

Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits