In-Class Activity: Participatory Journalism and Web Communities

(Note: If you were absent for this class, you will need to do a similar exercise on your own for another news site. Please speak to me about it.)

In class today we will begin an activity in which we examine news oriented websites in order to learn about their communities. This is a group exercise. Each group will be assigned a site to look at in detail. Your task is to try to understand the site not simply as a set of pages, links, and so forth, but as a socio-technical network that enables and promotes community participation. The question each group will use in their exploration is: “How does this site promote community and what is that community like?”

Here are a few specific guidelines to use as you try to answer this question:

• Tools: What specific tools does the site use to promote community? (Review We Media, chapter 4 for ideas.)
• Self-Description: How does this site present itself to the world? You may find in a site’s self-description (for example, in an “About” page) some evidence about the kind of community they hope to promote.
• Networking: Follow outgoing links from the site and see what kind of community that site is developing using those links. What does this suggest to you?
• Participation: What can you discover about who actually uses the site, how they use it, and why? What are the rules of participation? Is there a hierarchy in the community? If so, how much control do those at the top of the hierarchy seem to have over those at the bottom. Is the site delivering information to an audience? Or is it promoting conversation? How participatory is this journalism site?

I suggest that each group split up the pieces of this exercise so each participant looks at one specific question (overlap is okay). I will consult with groups today as they investigate their sites.

For one of next week’s individual weblog entries, each participant should have one entry of a couple of paragraphs or so focusing on your part of the exercise and linking to other members of your group.

If time permits today, we will discuss in class what you are finding. Otherwise we will have this discussion next Monday.

The sites for exploration (groups TBA in class) are:

1. neweurasia.net (Yulia, Kristina, Nataliya M., Victoria)
2. The New York Times (Sadyk, Yekaterina V., Zarina, Dauren)
3. OhMyNews (Sagydnyk, Akina, Anasstasiya)
4. The Guardian (Murager, Aliya, Semyon)
5. Baristanet (Aizhana, Vadim, Maks, Natalya S.)