Produsage and Citizen Journalism are Brothers

In my blog ‘I do not want to hear ‘Production’’, I briefly introduced that produsage is relevant to a vast array of key domains; some of which include knowledge management bases, social networking and the theme of this blog, citizen journalism. In this passage I will briefly outline how citizen journalism employs the produsage concept.

In my preceding blog I stated that open source content works through the produsage model that users collaborate together for improving and updating software. As Bruns explains in News Blogs and Citizen Journalism: Perpetual Collaboration in Evaluating the News is that citizen journalism operates in the same way as open source software, that they are both open, community based, hierarchical and challenge its corporate counterpart as opinion (and innovation) leader.

Citizen journalism compared to its counterpart ‘the traditional news production’ is a collaborative, shared free-for-all environment for participatory users to consume, share, update, edit and construct user-led DIY collaborative content. The content processed through citizen journalism is no longer generated by news professionals, but by anyone, people with credibility or no credibility, distributing through sites such as OhMyNews to become ‘experts’ based on their own content. All these particular attributes of citizen journalism are based rules that belong to the produsage concept. Brun’s explains that there are also four primary reasons as to why citizen journalism is of produsage. One of them being, open participation, if the communities within citizen journalism are sufficiently large enough, they can contribute more than a closed team of producers, however qualified. As well as unfinished artifacts, a continuing process of user-led content that is continually under development and is therefore always unfinished (but the development does follow evolutionary paths)

But let’s not forget that within collaborative online communities of news content, there is the significant problem that content can possibly be non-credible, non-accurate, biased or simply false. Outlined in Aligning Citizen Journalism and Traditional Journalism is the cold hard truth that journalists of the produsage will not 100% abide to the journalism code of conduct (An example is an obnoxious blog that is ‘news content’: Australian Stereotype Proven, Australians are Stupid). But is that seriously so bad? People can surely generate bad user-led content, but because citizen journalism is of the produsage, participants of the community are able to update, fix, edit and critique any content that is significantly not news worthy. And that is why produsage is surely the most innovative thing out there in the world; because all news content of citizen journalism is openly accessible to be improved or reviewed.

Traditional journalism is gathered only by staff journalists and is edited only by the editorial hierarchy. It may be more ‘news worthy’ and creditable, but citizen journalism provides on-going current, shared information from a diverse range of views rather than a media mogul.