You Report. You Decide, Too, While You’re At It.
A few years back, if you recall, you were Time’s Person of the Year. Because, y’know, you’d posted that thing about Mentos and Diet Coke on YouTube, or edited a Wikipedia post, or blogged, or something. In other words, Time realized that the internet was–belatedly–starting to deliver on some of the democratic promise of its early days.
More evidence can be found on Now Public, a news site that’s powered by the contributions of pretty much anyone who finds something that may be newsworthy and decides to write about it. Unlike Google News or Drew Curtis’s Fark, Now Public isn’t a news aggregator; the idea here is for you, the user, to get up off your ass and report something. Those somethings, when they’ve come, have been from all corners of the world, and have included subjects as diverse as Governor Rod Blagojevic and the Dalai Lama’s speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the Tibetan Uprising.
Some of the coverage is a bit rough around the edges. The writing style could stand a loose but sure editorial hand, the sourcing and fact-checking aren’t exactly New Yorker-caliber, and sometimes you’ve got to wade through an awful lot of verbiage on subjects you don’t find all that interesting to get to the bits you’d like. In other words, it’s a lot like your local newspaper, minus Dear Abby, the horoscopes, and Family Circus (Okay. So what’s the bad news? –Ed.).
Better still, unlike your local newspaper–which can’t afford someone in Karachi, and so uses the same copy from a wire service that every other paper’s been using–there’s a potential here for fresh (if sometimes biased) perspectives on stories, a good number of which would otherwise go un- or under-reported. And if you need your style fix, or reporting on culture, you can find that here as well. Now if we can just find an open-source Walter Mercado…
Tags: FARK, Google News, Media, News, Now Public, reporting, Web 2.0