Today I met up with Jeremy Toeman from LiveDigitally. For those that don’t know: LD was the host of my first blog posts – Jeremy let me run wild while I was still interning at Wired.
I talked with Jeremy a bit about future plans, the Knight News Challenge grants which I’m waiting on – and general goals.
One thing that came through: I really need to focus this blog. This is something I’ve known for a long time – but having a friend and fellow blogger tell that to you really brings it home.
As it is right now: This blog is an ego-space, with the occasional rant/idea/story that gets a lot of coverage.
Meanwhile, I’m spread out between NewAssignment.Net, Beatblogging.org, Newsinnovation.com, Broowaha, Propeller and OffTheBus (in that order too). I’m glad that I have the opportunity to work with some many people/companies- from Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis to AOL and Wired – but my personal blog has become a repository of cross-posts, extra ideas, or nonsensical rants lately as a result.
It’s time to get-refocused. On what? Citizen Journalism.
When people ask me what I do now, I say "I’m an online journalist." When they ask what kind of journalism – my immediate response is "I work in citizen journalism."
It’s a fun space. More importantly – it’s a growing space that, in my opinion, doesn’t have a champion blog. Obviously there are great bloggers and journalists out there who write about citizen journalism – but they tend to cover it as a theory. What I’m looking to do is cover citizen journalism as an industry blog. At least – that’s what I would like to do if I had the time.
Next on my list of things to do – find time.
This sounds definitely like a good idea. I think in general there should be more aggregation of discussions and projects going on in citizen journalism, the same goes for
entrepreneurial journalism.
Ironically, everyone is praising social networks like Facebook for bringing people together, but for larger discussions a lot of these are completely unusable.
Do it. Everyone talks a little bit about it; Dan Gillmor’s blog used to be the hub for it, but I think the network of people working in CJ is really distributed at this point.
Bring ’em together!
Oh, I just read your post at beatblogging.org…seems we agree on how unpractical Facebook is for managing discussions (ironically, I found the post via your facebook-status)
Nice seeing you last night! A lot of your ideas are very inspiring Dave, hope to see & hear great things!
First thing’s first — it’s time to re-design this website. No more of this crappy three row blog bullshit — it’s clutfuckugly and it’s wayyyy to much ego.
Seems to me, what you should/could do is (mostly) aggregate the (or your) gazillion relevant posts from elsewhere on the web, on a site like, ahem, Journafilter. (Or NCVoices, from whence the aggregator was recycled, hence the nonfunctional crud up top)
I cannot imagine anyone more suited to becoming the Romenesko of Citizen Journalism than you, David.
(although IMO you should be applying for the Knight community den mother position as well… we need to clone you.)
p.s speling feedback request – which looks more right, journofilter or journafilter?