After watch­ing the Us Now doc­u­men­tary this morn­ing I started think­ing about how par­tic­i­pa­tory jour­nal­ism could be improved upon. Here’s what I came up with:

One of the big things they empha­size in Us Now is the abil­ity that the own­ers of Ebbsfleet United have to vote for not only who plays, but where they play. What if this notion were car­ried over to journalism?

The stan­dard pitch page on Spot.us

Spot.us is already doing a great job of cre­at­ing a model within which peo­ple can decide what sto­ries get cov­ered, but I don’t think it does enough.

The cur­rent Spot.us model allows for jour­nal­ists to pitch story ideas that they would cover. The com­mu­nity then con­tributes until one such idea is funded. While def­i­nitely bet­ter than a tra­di­tional model couldn’t this be taken one step further?

What if we were to open a news orga­ni­za­tion com­pletely up to a com­mu­nity? The peo­ple involved get to pitch story ideas and vote on which jour­nal­ist they would like to see cover a story.

This could even be a way to gen­er­ate rev­enue. A news orga­ni­za­tion could offer a pre­mium sub­scrip­tion that would allow you access to these story pitches and news­room decisions.

In my mind this would be a much bet­ter way to stim­u­late rev­enue than sim­ply pay­ing for the news to be deliv­ered to you. Instead of being a pas­sive con­sumer the reader would be engaged with the news process and would have a deep con­nec­tion to what sto­ries are cov­ered and what per­spec­tive they are given.

Furthermore, by allow­ing the com­mu­nity to decide which jour­nal­ist cov­ers a story there’s a whole new range of per­spec­tives that would be opened up.

For exam­ple, say I want to see more cov­er­age of a sec­tar­ian con­flict in South America, the tra­di­tional cov­er­age would mean dis­patch­ing who­ever the news organization’s spe­cial­ist in that area is. What if instead I wanted the per­spec­tive of some­one famil­iar with sec­tar­ian wars but who had expe­ri­ence in a dif­fer­ent region of the globe? Maybe I would want Thomas Ricks to cover it because of his exper­tise in cov­er­ing the con­flict in Iraq. Who knows what this kind of new per­spec­tive might create.

There would cer­tainly be down­sides to such a model. For one, it would be a neces­sity for jour­nal­ists to share and col­lab­o­rate on their con­tacts. Ricks prob­a­bly couldn’t just jump in and cover the con­flict with­out first talk­ing to the South American spe­cial­ist about who he may want to talk to.

Ultimately though, I see a tremen­dous poten­tial for allow­ing news cov­er­age like this and I think that the types of sto­ries cov­ered could be quite fascinating.