Who's the expert now?

After Thursday's class where Dr. Dianne Lynch, dean of the Roy Park School of Communications at Ithacca College, spoke about new media I stumbled across a blog that spoke about the idea of collective intelligence that she touched on in class. Lynch touched on this idea, referring to it as Citizen Media or Citizen Journalism. The blog called New Media Mogul, the research blog of Hugh R. Macdonald, discussed the issue as a hotly debated topic amongst anyone who is interested in new media.

The blog explains that in its basic form collective intelligence is the idea that everyone has a contribution to make and when combined those contributions can create a quality product. This idea Macdonald says is a very controversial topic. We've seen this through sites like Wikipedia were anyone came contribute to the online encyclopedia, and yet the information has so far proven to be pretty accurate. Plus when it's not it can be edited by someone who knows the topic better.

So what happens when this enters the journalism field? Are journalists out of a job because citizens are doing all the reporting? Lynch discussed in class how some journalists are worried about this kind of transformation because we are supposed to be the experts on things. They worry that we will become less credible or not needed if the public decides that they can get the same news from an average Joe on the Internet. Macdonald says in his blog entry that citizen journalism has already proved that it can cover some issues more effectively than the mainstream media, mainly because of the limited time that the mainstream media can devote to any one issue.

I found Macdonald's view to be very interesting, so if your interested in this new topic of citizen journalism you should take a look at his blog.