hackbash

How’s this for a paper trail? Dave writes a blog post bemoaning the distance between him and Marmite, I take a photo of my breakfast and post it on Flickr, somebody writing about whether wholemeal bread is healthy asks to use it to illustrate their post, I end up blogging about the whole thing.

Correct: no paper involved, but it’s still an interesting example of the random and unpredictable way that stuff pans out online, and it served to introduce me to NowPublic, which had previously escaped my attention.

Which might not be a good sign. I’m not pretending I’m at the centre of the net or that I know which way the digital wind blows, but I spend a lot of time looking for news stories and double-checking them on the internet. Either NowPublic has never been relevant to a news story I’m researching, or Google just doesn’t like its face.

I’ve been scornful about citizen journalism, but mostly because I just hate the term. NP’s clearly a big community and there ought to be plenty of good stuff on there. I need to spend more time looking at the site, but most of the stories I’ve looked at involve a brief introduction by the writer, followed by the wholesale quoting of a recognised news source. Hardly the news-gathering force implied by the NP blog’s “army of reporters” hyperbole.

I can see the point of gathering news in one place, but on early evidence I’m not sure that NP is as clever as the papers, as quick as tweets, or as interesting as blogs.

Tags: citizen journalism, Flickr, Marmite, NowPublic, toast