Call it participatory journalism or journalism from the edges. Simply put, it refers to individuals playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, sorting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information—a task once reserved almost exclusively to the news media. “Blogs are in some ways a new form of journalism, open to anyone who can establish and maintain a Web site, and they have exploded in the past year,” it is journalism of a different sort, one not tightly confined by the profession’s traditions and values. Bloggers value informal conversation, egalitarianism, subjective points of view, and colorful writing over profits, central control, objectivity and filtered prose. Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University who has consulted on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies, sees the difference between traditional media and blogging communities this way: “The order of things in broadcast is ‘filter, and then publish.’ The order in communities is ‘publish, and then filter.’ If you go to a dinner party, you don’t submit your potential comments to the hosts, so that they can tell you which ones are good enough to air before the group, but this is how broadcast works every day. Writers submit their stories in advance, to be edited or rejected before the public ever sees them. Participants in a community, by contrast, say what they have to say, and the good is sorted from the mediocre after the fact.”
Shirky, also suggests that mainstream media fail to understand that despite a participant’s lack of skill or journalistic training, the Internet itself acts as an editing mechanism, with the difference that “editorial judgment is applied at the edges … after the fact, not in advance,”. Seen in this light, it has been suggested that bloggers should not be considered in isolation but as part of an emerging new media ecosystem— a network of ideas. No one should expect a complete, unvarnished encapsulation of a story or idea at any one blogging site. In such a community, bloggers discuss, dissect, and extend the stories created by mainstream media. These
communities also produce participatory journalism, grassroots reporting, annotative reporting, commentary and fact-checking, which the mainstream media feed upon, developing them as
a pool of tips, sources and story ideas. The relationship is symbiotic.