Distributed Journalism's Future: Distributed journalism isn't new. Professionals have been doing it for a long time. When I was the Vermont stringer for the New York Times, back in the early 1980s, the paper's National Desk would occasionally put the word out to stringers in all 50 states, asking them, for example, to call state government people about some topic or another and send a memo back to New York. The same kind of thing is done all the time by major publications with their own staffers on big stories. One person may write the piece, but a collection of many, many reporters does the legwork.
It's not new online, either. Bulletin boards have done some of this kind of thing, though not in a particularly easy-to-use way, by aggregating lots of data about specific issues, people, companies, whatever. The collection of knowledge often is greater than the sum of its parts if you somehow learn something valuable. The Wikipedia experiment shows the power of assembling many brains every day.
The potential for distributed journalism to be a key part of tomorrow's news strikes me as immense. We in citizen journalism -- and, if we're smart, in professional journalism -- can focus the energy and knowledge of regular folks, and especially their willingness to do some small amount of legwork to help feed a larger whole, on all kinds of things.
