Tech Blog #4: Independent Media: Citizen’s Involvement in Journalism?

You will donate money for Obama Campaign, you will donate money for Heidi Earthquake, but would you like to donate money to journalists to cover big news?

Independent Media (IM) is rising quickly in the world in recently years. According to Indymedia, the world’s largest independent media center (www.indymedia.org), hundreds of journalists have participated in over one hundred IM organizations. In pursuit of absolute media freedom and telling truths, they are offering grassroots, non-corporate, radical and more feature coverage.

But in my opinion, freedom is not free. How those reporting costs of feature stories are covered? Only by donations? If so, how to make a priority to decide which projects would go head for interviews? As you know, there are so many projects proposed by IM journalists on their website.

Some IM post the project details about different categories and different regions including the topic background, situation and even the project plan for interviews.  By doing so, audience would have an initial idea on each project. If it interested you a lot, just click the donation button to support them. From this point, the public is now gatekeepers! They help journalists to select the news topic and the process is like the online shopping or supermarket.

It is definitely not a communication technology, but it leverages the online payment technology to create the tailor-made journalism. We cannot always expect a technology revolution or killer app. But what we can is to be as creative as scientists by transforming Internet applications to the business or lifestyle world, just like Independent Media’s operation. This kind of new operation model of journalism will bring two main impacts.

First, audience can now being involved in the journalism production process. They have rights to determine what would be covered. They are GATEKEEPERS!

Second, IM is the outcome of fierce competitions among traditional media. Traditional media always have to make a balance on press cost and quality and thereby have to give up some interesting but time-consuming or cost-consuming news stories. It also means journalists could not write what they want. But IM solves the problem! I even believe that maybe traditional media would adopt IM’s operation mode someday. As we know, due to challenges from digitalization, what traditional media can do is either to be digitalized (just like Apple Daily’s Action News) or to be tailor-made style. So IM’s model is not a bad idea.