Citizen Storytelling

Neil McIntosh asks us (via JD Lasica) to forget citizen journalism. Like Mark Deuze, McIntosh believes the future of journalism lies in "…the web's emerging storytelling culture…"

What blogs, and picture phones, and other "me media" do is bring everyday storytelling to the web. They're mainly personal stories, being published—yes—for an audience, but an audience that we think we know very well. And we tell those stories using the words we write on simple CMSs, like blogs, or via pictures distributed via Flickr, or movies made in iMovie.

Occasionally—very occasionally—those stories, pictures and movies will intersect with a story which a very large audience is interested in, as happened to the mobloggers who got pictures of the July 7 bombings. But a big, mainstream audience is never the intention—we're just using technology to do what we've always done, and tell stories.