Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production

TL;DR: Overall, this book charts the current state of play in the area of online gatewatching, open news, and participatory journalism, and provides the tools to analyse and classify the various forms of online publishing in this field.

Abstract: Recent years have seen the emergence of a new genre of user-driven Websites engaged in a novel form of news reporting which has been described as open publishing or open news, in analogy to the open source movement. Utilising state-of-the-art content management systems, these sites combine news, rumours and background information as well as community discussion and commentary on their chosen topic, and frequently serve as a first point of entry for readers interested in learning more about the field. Examples for this genre include Slashdot (http://Slashdot.org/), Openflows News (http://www.openflows.org/), and the Indymedia network (http://www.indymedia.org/). This book documents an extensive study of open news and related sites around the world, including interviews with staff of key sites in order to analyse their inner workings. It investigates the feasibility and the limitations of user community self-policing methods, and the effectiveness of the gatewatching process. It connects this with more recent developments in related areas, such as Weblogs and the Wiki movement, and develops a taxonomy of collaborative online publishing models. Overall, then, it charts the current state of play in the area of online gatewatching, open news, and participatory journalism, and provides the tools to analyse and classify the various forms of online publishing in this field.