iReport Versus iConflict

We got a bunch of emails this week asking us how iConflict is going to be different from CNN’s iReport, a citizen journalism project they unveiled this week. Frankly, it will be a lot different and that’s a good thing.

Unlike every other citizen journalism site, iConflict has a focused niche - conflict and crises. We do not run the gamut on topics from Britney Spears to Baghdad. With serious news mixed in with so much nonsense who has the time to sort through it all? Who wants to sort through it? Certainly, there is a better way.

Media of today is melding the serious treatment of important news into other far less significant stories. But wait, this has happened before. As Neil Postman found in his landmark 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” entertainment became such a pervasive element in television coverage of news stories, that it became impossible for important stories to be properly told.

The Internet and citizen journalism give us a chance to break free of the mistakes from the past. But instead of doing this, CNN is just repeating history.

On February 15th the top story on the iReport homepage was entitled “Breaking News Ketchup.” The second story was on the weather in New York City, which happened to be lousy. As if bad weather in February was news worthy? For those seeking substance, there was a story on the children’s character Elmo posing as a prostitute. Clearly, on iReport, the online community is amusing itself to death.

iConflict has conceived a new form of journalism we call “collaborative journalism.” This concept posits that news is best if blended between traditional reporters and citizen journalists. There are stories, particularly complex that require verification and editing, and for that we have journalists. However, citizen journalists can contribute to such stories, by adding their own images, video or comments to them. Then, there are stories that do not require degrees or press passes to cover, and perhaps are left best to citizen journalists. There’s no rule book on when a story should be covered by either type of journalist, nor should there be. For too long, the focus has been on the debate between the role of traditional versus citizen journalists in the future of media. But this debate misses the point entirely.

The point is that there is a place for both.

If news was a computer program, it has been Microsoft - a closed source program. Today, news needs to shift to an open source model and become the Linux of reporting. At iConflict, news will achieve this open source model. This means a story is not static, it can have material added to it or removed from it by others. It means, no one holds the pass code to journalism anymore.

Before the Internet, the iConflict model - of providing an open source news forum with a specific niche audience in mind, would be pointless. It wouldn’t work. But given the global demand for such a service, it can now be provided.

2007 saw the first round of citizen journalism sites emerge, but the real future of such sites will be revealed during 2008 when sites like iConflict are released. Then, maybe, finally, we can stop amusing ourselves to death.