Rebecca Blood: Flickr and “collaborative photojournalism”

Rebecca Blood coins a new term, collaborative journalism:

[from How Flickr single-handedly invented collaborative photojournalism :: Rebecca Blood]

What is collaborative journalism? I would define it as news reporting, enabled by the Internet, done by a dispersed, unorganized group of people — or a group that spontaneously (and temporarily) organizes around their interest in a particular event. It’s a compelling idea, but unfortunately — and in spite of many millions of blogs and wikis and online forums — actual examples are few and far between.

I had believed that was because most people are just not that interested in reporting the news, but I was wrong. Most of us can’t wait to “break” a story to our friends, whether we’ve just witnessed a car accident, a celebrity sighting, or discovered that friends who were dating have broken up.

I’m beginning to suspect that what citizen reporters lack is the proper tool. Because the Flickr slideshow of photos of the French employment riots [Flash required] amply demonstrates that, on Flickr at least, collaborative photojournalism is thriving. That success is at least as much a product of Flickr itself as it is a product of the contributing photographers.

Self-organizing memetrackers? Imagine a meta-memeorandum tool, where an individual could simply define a term, or group of terms, and pull in a handful of RSS feeds, and create a special purpose memeorandum to track what’s being said about that theme. Others could add their feeds, and someone — perhaps the orginator of the memetracker, or some group of people — could deem that some posts have inherent merit, while others would be pulled in based on linkcount.

Gabe Rivera… are you listening? We should talk…