Participatory journalism, and particularly how participatory journalism is practiced online, has been one of our key interests in the course so far. You will remember the definition offered in the We Media report:
- “Participatory journalism: The act of a citizen, or group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information. The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.” (We Media, pg. 9)
The We Media report is concerned with looking at how New Information Technologies can be used to promote participatory journalism online. In other words, its authors argue that NITs are making it possible for the audience to take an active role in the process of creating news rather than simply receiving news produced by professional news organizations. They further argue that the new media ecosystem enabled by NITs is changing the nature of journalism and democratizing the process of creating news.
We Media looks at how a number of different online technologies (discussion groups, user-generated content, weblogs, collaborative publishing, RSS syndication, and so on) help users provide commentary, filter and sort news, check facts, engage in grassroots reporting, and other news oriented tasks.
There are many examples throughout the report showing this process in action at various websites. However, the sites in the report are mostly based in the United States and are exclusively in English. This makes sense for the report, which is concerned with presenting a recent phenomenon in the context of the practice of journalism in the U.S.
The problem for us, though, is that this presentation is too limited. It doesn’t tell us about the potential for online participatory journalism outside of the U.S. And particularly, it tells us nothing about online participatory journalism in this region.
We have looked a bit at online participatory journalism in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, primarily by exploring the neweurasia.net websites. However, this tells us only about the neweurasia (English language) sites, and not much about how people are using NITs here. For one thing, this is just one set of sites, and although there are a number of people writing for the neweurasia sites from this region, others are located far away. For another thing, Kazakhstan’s dominant languages are Russian and Kazakh, and sites in English cannot fully represent the experiences of people here.
Our task now is to discover whether there is something we might call online participatory journalism being practiced in Kazakhstan, and to try to develop an initial profile of that practice. We will begin this process by working in groups and creating profiles of a few weblogs. (Each group will examine one weblog. Post your profile as a comment on this entry by 1 pm Friday, 2 Nov. and be prepared to present it in class that day.)
- ru.kazakhstan.neweurasia.net, neweurasia’s Russian-language weblog on Kazakhstan
- kz.kazakhstan.neweurasia.net, neweurasia’s Kazakh-language weblog on Kazakhstan
- adam-kesher.livejournal.com, Adam Kesher’s Russian-language Livejournal site
- Askar Shushekov’s Media Support Center site (rus)
Provide the following information about the site you are profiling:
- Site name and URL
- Language(s) used on the site
- Who authors the site? Is it a group weblog? Individual weblog? Are full names available? First names? Pseudonyms?
- Where is/are the author(s) located?
- How long has the site been active? How active is the site? (How many entries per week, on average?)
- Does the site allow users to comment? If so, are there many comments? Or few comments?
- Does the site provide an RSS feed?
- What community does this site connect with? Look at links in entries, at the blogroll, and at the comments section: What are the sources of information the site uses? What sites does the author consider important?
- Overall content: What kind of topics are addressed at the site? Are they personal? News oriented?
- Impressions: Is the site engaging in participatory journalism in the sense described in the We Media report? What qualities does it have (or lack) that make you see the site as an example of online participatory journalism?
- What else of interest do you observe about the site?
