When we become the media

Over at the Participant.net See It Now group blog, I posted this:

I've been spending a lot of time with young, Net-savvy users lately. Will these young people join traditional news organizations, or will they take a different route to participating in the media?

Increasingly, the answer is the latter.

Fewer young people are looking to join newspaper newsrooms, given the economic upheavals ahead for the industry and the unwelcoming culture that infests newsrooms' approach to youths.

More and more young people are feeling alienated and put off by the mainstream media. This week's Sacramento Bee ran a story titled, No room for news.  Today's tech-savvy youths lack an appetite for traditional media.  Excerpt:

"It's more interesting for me to log on to (Internet) forum boards and see what other people ... are saying about current events than listen to a report on the news for two minutes that isn't very informative at all," says Taylor Wang, a 23-year-old senior at UC Davis.

Avi Ehrlich, a senior journalism major at CSUS, put it more bluntly: "We get exactly what we want when we want it instead of somebody deciding for us what we need."

I suspect they're dead on.

We're living in a transitional time in which we're moving away from a media culture of top-down, tightly controlled, formulaic, father-knows-best news structures to one that is more open, democratic, distributed, inclusive, informal and collaborative.

Let's call it citizens media. Big-J Journalists often look askance at such grassroots efforts, but the same forces that have spurred the creation of 28 million weblogs are now playing out in fascinating ways across the landscape:

At Ourmedia.org,  80,000 people have published nearly 150,000 works of personal media in just 11 months. At South Korea's OhmyNews, 40,000 citizen journalists take part in the news equation. Citizens have crafted 750,000 articles for Wikipedia and its companion citizen journalism site, WikiNews.

Hyperlocal news sites such as Baristanet, Coastsider, IBrattleboro, FreeNewMexican, GoSkokie, H2Otown, Muncie Free Press, Benicia News and many others continue to flourish, based on the passions and interests of a small number of citizen publishers. CurrentTV is based on the arresting idea that we the people can create our own media. Participant Productions is channeling the same energy into Hollywood films and a series of blogs to engage the citizenry.

I turn regularly to citizen media sites such as Flickr, NowPublic and Metafilter to immerse myself in community media, grassroots creativity and competing points of view. Jeff Jarvis recently examined the role of Howard Stern’s Howard 100 as alternative news. Grassroots media activists are playing an active role in filling the gaps left by the mainstream media’s coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for the people of Louisiana. Others have formed meet-up groups to collaborate in making media. Dan Gillmor has created a Center for Citizen Media that holds promise as a hub for collaboration and new ideas.

The mainstream media need to learn how to embrace these emerging media forms rather than how to route around them. These independent outlets bring a passion, fresh voice, ingenuity and conscience to their work, something that a large portion of the public believe traditional news organizations have lost.

Millions of people believe that traditional media institutions have failed them in protecting the public interest and covering stories that hold meaning for them. Increasingly, they will turn to the Internet -- and in many ways create their own news-making apparatus.