Niche Channels Developing Newspaper/Magazine Quality
Posted on August 13, 2006
Filed Under Channels and Content, Commercial Trends |
Projects like Netscape’s new news portal, leaving aside the spikey comments the new service has attracted, give a boost to smaller-scale projects such as Hotelchatter, armchairgm, jaunted.
Respectively a hotel recommender site, a sports-news-from-users site, and a travel site, these are rock-solid examples of tomorrow’s magazines and specialist news-pages.
They ought to have us questioning the value of terms like citizen journalism. It’s becoming an irrelevant and insulting term.
Armchairgm says:
“Our mission is to build the ultimate sports community. We believe fans know more about sports than experts, so we decided to make a website where you’re in control.”
That of course is a philsophy common to all user-generated sites. The community element is secondary to good reportage and informed opinion.
These are the kind of sites you go to as a writer who believes he/she really does have the skills that the professional writing newspapers and magazines has. You arrive as an equal.
I’ve felt for a long time that in societies with a high level of literacy and education, excluding people from the newsmaking, opinion-forming franchise appears more and more absurd.
That’s not just a vote for citizen journalism though. It’s saying a little more.
The division between you reading this and deciding also to write about it, and me writing about it as a journalist, is an artificial division. We shouldn’t be talking citizen-versus-professional journalist, particularly for this type of content.
We might talk good writer/poor writer, kudos seeker or objective, passionate or dispassionate, but the pro-citizen formula is irrelevant.
My hope is these sites will grow into substantial vertical information sources with a lively opinion base, just like I hope Netscape comes to rival Huffington Post and New York Times.
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