Jennifer Southee

IN THIS CHAPTER I LEARNED more about audience participation in contemporary news organizations and blogs. Crowdsourcing is when journalists give audiences tasks (sometimes paid and sometimes not) just like a professional reporter. For example, if a scandal occurs involving, lets say, mortgage rates, then the community affected will be able to give more vital information than a few reporters might be able to uncover. Of course there is a limit to crowdsourcing; you should use it to help your organization or blog improve, but according to Briggs there is a greater chance of failure if you rely solely on crowdsourcing to power your news. Another way to rely on readers is to use open-source reporting, which means that an organization or blog can put out their ideas for their stories up early so that they can attain feedback, sources, and other advice from their readers to help build the story. Yet another form of reporting is beatblogging: I wasn’t too sure about what it was from the book, but I looked up more information on beatblogging.org and found that it is a blog that focuses on one topic and allows anyone to comment, debate, discuss, etc. Pretty simple. Pro-Am Journalism I already knew about through CNN’s iReport. With Pro-Am users post their own content directly to an organizations website.