Also posted at NewAssignment.net:
Rough transcript
What have you learned from OffTheBus?
I’ve learned that, as Jay Rosen said a couple years ago, this divide between bloggers and journalists is a phony divide.
The future resides in some fusion of the two and what we are learning at OffTheBus.net is that citizen journalism is a great idea, not so easy to do. Journalists have their problems, but they have a lot of skills – the question for us is how do we combine the best of legacy media with the new media, and it’s not easy.
How do you push the boundaries of Networked Journalism (described by Richard Sambrook here)
I think the most interesting part is in fact networked, distributed or Posse journalism in its different variations. I was arguing yesterday that more mainstream media hasn’t already adopted this model. It’s more powerful and more economic, that is the most exciting step. That’s where the future really takes place, because you need the citizen, the non-professionals to be out there as your posse rounding up information for you. But my old world view of it is – when that comes in, you need people with a different sent of skills, perhaps they come from the citizens themselves, but they have editorial skills that take that information mold it, shape it, turn it into stories or accessible information. That last step adds a lot more value to it.
What’s next for OffTheBus.net to capture that.
That’s easy, we are going to do more of that. We are going to shift our emphasis more to do the distributed work, that’s the sharper part of the cutting edge.