Citizen Journalism

So my buddy Lance, just posted his first podcast. This whole thing got me thinking about Citizen Journalism and how it is spreading across the various media creators. Now you too can become your own author! your own radio host! and soon your own director!

The First Amendment
With the onslaught of digital, we have lowered the bar of entry, and I don't mean it in a bad way...This is what the visionaries of the first amendment had as a fundamental principle...not the idea of lowering the bar of entry but rather in search for truth we needed to get as many voices out there as possible. Once we open the floodgates, the garbage has been let in, but for the sake of truth we are willing to deal with it. The question is what is citizen journalism all about? I have a feeling it is not a large number of voices for the sake of truth...just noise.

Creating Editing Tools
So I've also been noticing that as mediums such as publishing, photos, video, and audio have become more and more pervasive, users learn to use editing tools. Remember the days of the 56.6 k dial up where the Rich Text Editor was and ? Now all we have to do is find it on the toolbar. With items that are mainly photo viewers, we are hard-pressed not to find the basic editing functions (rotate, enlarge, red-eye reduction etc...). I would say with the bandwidth getting larger and larger, video, and audio will have an introduction of this "Easy Edit Kit" (Media Professionals: Cover your ears) If you guys haven't checked out, Professor Marc Davis at SIMS had a visionary idea of automation of editing video to the beat of U2's numb (click on the 4th one from the left). I think there should be easy stuff for audio also...it would be nice to have audio-markings so you can fast forward to the right place...etc...


A Bit of Philosophy
So on posting on Lance's blog, i realized that I mentioned feeds being an answer to the growing amount of information and citizen journalism , I've seen this great question evolve from the following:

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it happen?

If a war is going on in the world and CNN does not cover it, did it happen?

If an event is going on and it isn't blogged about, did it happen?

Ultimately it will become a matter of getting the report to everyone, so soon it will be:

If an event occured and it wasn't on your blog feed, did it happen?


Okay it' s almost 2 am now, I wrote this to expand and hopefully correct my comment on Lance's blog. *sigh* enough for now.