Photo by Leonid Yaitsky

The job of journalists suffered several changes since the boom of content published by normal ex-readers, whether the professionals admit it or choose to ignore it. Some are starting to adapt creating their own blogs. Newspaper websites have also suffered modifications and now tend to include a commented space for each article or even a discussion forum. This is one way to emphasize the relation between writers and readers and a great way to improve the overall feeling for a specific media company, something that would definitely make the difference when choosing from the numerous source of information.

But today a growing portion of readers doesn’t get satisfied by simply being a passive member of this process. They also want to contribute. Yes, they still search content filters for their incoming information, but they urge to get their side of the story exposed. They want to add news facts they gathered and share them with everyone. In many cases, the press media portals don’t fulfill all the users needs for participation but now there are many more options. Many tend to create their own space, a blog, a live journal, even a photo/videolog, but this kind of format usually lacks in collaboration, excepting a few examples of well designed editorial networks.

There are already some examples of a new kind of platforms created to host this kind of movement. They aim for cooperation and for the sense of community, using two kind of approaches. Small and local communities with very relevant information are emerging like outside.in or backfence. They tend to be very focused on local news and services, outstanding any kind of national or global similar service. On the opposite we have global websites like Wikinews that benefit from a much wider community and audience, but aren’t able to give the kind of quality and relevance local websites have.

But these aren’t the only options we have. Personally I would enjoy much more an aggregator for this kind of information. We could simply post our news calmly in our blog, while services like Pingerati would get the valuable information out of our post and into several aggregation platforms. Then it could be searched in places like Technorati Kitchen (with a more powerful kind of search I hope, but the kitchen is still a on beta service). For this to happen we would need something like microformats to help identify the important bits out of our post like time, place, photos, tags and whatever you can think of. For me, this is where we should head for: implicit collaboration of contents to create a real network of information.

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