Crowdsourcing and flexible lines

The idea is this: call on your readers to give you the stories, to look at your FOI documents, to find the things that are within their expertise so you can use your expertise and find the story.

Is it a good thing? Are putting ourselves in line to rely too much on the audience?

Worse, are we giving up our position as the agenda setters?

But still, we choose which stories to highlight, and in many ways this is an invaluable resource for getting stories the public wants but that journalists would rarely be able to search out.

The problems here though just reinforce the multitude of decisions that have to be made by newspapers and journalists on the web daily. Where are those lines - and as they become more "flexible," are the flexible enough not to break under pressure.

I don't know, and I doubt I ever will. However in this case, I think crowdsourcing is a good thing - as long as it's crowdsourcing and not crowdreporting or crowds as the newspaper

Newspaper stories must be in print...right?

So as we are all pushing toward this new media wave in newspaper journalism, we have print stories that either run alone or have multimedia (video or audio) stories along with them - but as newspaper industry journalists, can we run just video?

Personally, I don't think we should. These videos are a fantastic supplement to stories in print, but the format and style of the news content in videos on newspaper Web sites doesn't lend itself as well to representing a story in a standalone fashion.

For instance, my favorite newspaper videos are ones that focus on one person, one story, one very visual event that is part of a bigger issue. The print story sets it up and the video drives it home. I think the combination makes fro a very poignant message in a lot of cases.

I think that if we were to start running stories only in their web video format, we would start having to make the content of our videos and the news style of them like that of broadcast journalism, and I think that would be doing the audience a disservice.

Broadcast journalism certainly has its place, but it is grounded in one place and it is a blending of hard news and very short burst clips of personal experiences. But in newspaper journalism, running print and video stories in the style that has developed for them does - at its best - highlight the best of both worlds.

interesting stats found during research

I have found a number of interesting stats while I've been researching my final paper/thesis/rant, and part of what I'm trying to do is coalesce these different numbers into some semblance of a coherent and believable hypothesis.

Anyway, here's the interesting numbers I've found:

According to one set of stats, 30.9% of those with incomes under $50,000 a year have internet access in their homes. At the same time, 32.7% in that group said they had accessed the internet from work, home or other in the past 30 days. Obviously, those stats go well together. Their alignment suggests that people with internet access are using it.

According to another set of stats, 100% of libraries in areas with a "poverty status" above 40% have internet access, suggesting that these libraries are pushing to offer internet access to low-income areas.

But putting those numbers together suggests that for people in the "lower" income brackets (and yes, $50,000 is a pretty high income, but I'm trying to draw a corellary, tenuous though it may be), people who use computers are likely to be mainly those who have them.

So, is this huge push for library access useful?

I would like to do that poll - for low-income areas, what percentage have computers at home, what numbers access the internet at home, and what numbers access the internet from the library - also, what numbers are willing to access from the library.

All this research I am trying to put together is to answer the question of whether or not online media can serve the needs of low-income communities.