WEdia: WE Are All Reporters Now

On the BBC news website, Dan Gilmor suggests traditional journalists should stop attacking citizen journalists and start working with them:

Citizen journalism and professional journalism are not mutually exclusive concepts.

We’re actually heading toward an ecosystem that will support a variety of journalistic endeavours… when professional journalists ask their audiences for pictures, they are taking a useful step.

They can, and should, go considerably deeper, however, by giving audiences the tools to participate more fully in the emergent global conversation of which journalism is a vital part.

Local publishers and broadcasters should be aiming to help their communities engage in that conversation, via blogs, podcasts, discussion boards and all of the other conversational tools.

BBC NEWS