Chapter 3 of Mark Brigg’s JournalismNext discusses the ideas of news as a collaborative effort between journalists and their audiences.

Crowdsourcing: According to Briggs “harnesses the sustained power of community to improve a service or information base.” In a sense, it uses the power of the many readers to aid with the few journalists. Crowdsourcing allows for a more efficient way to report on news in a more insightful manner

• Firefox uses a volunteer team under the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation (giving Microsoft a run for its money)
• Wikipedia allows for users to post on individual pages (Encyclopedia Britannica can not keep up with updating articles and information)

Open-Source Reporting: A form of transparent, distributed news reporting used to benefit the audience while acquiring benefits from the audience. While a news story is being formulated, bits of pertinent information can be posted.

Types of Open-Source Reporting

• Beatblogging: A method of forming a network on a traditional beat then leading a discussion in order to provide more in-depth coverage on a story
• Link Curation: Linking to other news outlets (news organizations used to think that if they sent readers somewhere else, they wouldn’t return…Google sends readers away but they come right back)

Pro-Am Journalism: Allows an audience to publish directly to the same platform as professional journalists, thus sharing news and making it interactive

• Neighborsgo.com allows for Dallas, Texas citizens to post small news items (A newspaper staff can’t get to every single event in a community)
• MyCommunityNOW uses the same concept but in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It uses the best submissions for local print editions