Grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media's monopoly on the news, transforming it from a lecture to a conversation. Not content to accept the news as reported, these readers-turned-reporters are publishing in real time to a worldwide audience via the Internet. The impact of their work is just beginning to be felt by professional journalists and the newsmakers they cover. In We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, nationally known business and technology columnist Dan Gillmor tells the story of this emerging phenomenon, and sheds light on this deep shift in how we make and consume the news. We the Media is essential reading for all participants in the news cycle:

• Consumers learn how they can become producers of the news. Gillmor lays out the tools of the grassroots journalist's trade, including personal Web journals (called weblogs or blogs), Internet chat groups, email, and cell phones. He also illustrates how, in this age of media consolidation and diminished reporting, to roll your own news, drawing from the array of sources available online and even over the phone.

• Newsmakers politicians, business executives, celebrities get a wake-up call. The control that newsmakers enjoyed in the top-down world of Big Media is seriously undermined in the Internet Age. Gillmor shows newsmakers how to successfully play by the new rules and shift from control to engagement.

• Journalists discover that the new grassroots journalism presents opportunity as well as challenge to their profession. One of the first mainstream journalists to have a blog, Gillmor says, "My readers know more than I do, and that's a good thing." In We the Media, he makes the case to his colleagues that, in the face of a plethora of Internet-fueled news vehicles, they must change or become irrelevant.

At its core, We the Media is a book about people. People like Glenn Reynolds, a law professor whose blog postings on the intersection of technology and liberty garnered him enough readers and influence that he became a source for professional journalists. Or Ben Chandler, whose upset Congressional victory was fueled by contributions that came in response to ads on a handful of political blogs. Or Iraqi blogger Zayed, whose Healing Irag blog (healingiraq.blogspot.com) scooped Big Media. Or acridrabbit, who inspired an online community to become investigative reporters and discover that the dying Kaycee Nichols sad tale was a hoax. Give the people tools to make the news, We the Media asserts, and they will. Journalism in the 21st century will be fundamentally different from the Big Media that prevails today. We the Media casts light on the future of journalism, and invites us all to be part of it.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 30 Ratings

A Journalist Passionately Embraces the Internet - 2006-06-21
Reviewer Rating:
Many people blame the Internet for accelerating the long-term decline of newspaper circulation, and think that the Internet is crippling the future of American journalism.

Don Gillmor believes that the Internet has the potential to dramatically improve American journalism and widen its appeal.

Gillmor is no naive innocent. He demonstrates that he has an extraordinarily detailed command of the interrelationships and applications of the many internet and software technologies and journalism. I met Gillmor in April, 2004, at the BloggerconII conference organized by Dave Winer and held at Harvard Law School. He held the attention of his audience of bloggers through his mixture of detailed knowledge and passionate advocacy for the worth of blogging and the value of it becoming an income-generating activity.

No journalist should fail to read this book. Nor should any citizen consumer of journalism who participates online. Only a small part manifesto, this book is a detailed roadmap of the future of journalism for those informed enough and bold enough to take it. Those in business and government who are the subjects of journalism would also do well to read it.

The future of journalism, Gillmor says, will be much more participatory in the future than it has been in the past. The many to many communications style of the Internet will become the style of successful journalism. Journalism will less about lecturing and more about leading a discussion. The "eat your spinach" school of civic advocacy will be replaced by a greater connection between readers and journalists in which readers will influence both the definition of news and the content of individual news stories.

The proliferation of tens of millions of blogs means that the separation of news producers and news consumers is far less than it used to be. Everyone can produce news in the blogosphere. One duty of journalists is to sift the through the blogosphere and find out what is relevant. Another duty of journalists is to actively engage the public in the news gathering process. The definition of what professionalism in journalism is will be rapidly changing.

What is now at the edges, Gillmour says, will and should be moved to the center. Public concerns that once were marginal now will become mainstream.

As a Pennsylvania state legislator, I believe that this will have significant public policy effects--especially the areas of taxation and public welfare expenditures. For the first time, those with average and below average incomes are able to communicate their concerns to a mass audience. The more the digital divide in Internet access erodes, as the divide in telephone and television access has eroded, the greater the erosion will be of the upper middle class dominance of the political process. The stakes for putting the brakes on the trends Gillmor describes will get increasingly large in the years ahead.

This is not just a book for journalists and the subjects of journalism, or even just a book for currently active internet participants. The detailed accounts of the consumer applications of various technologies of what he calls the "the read-write web" or "technology that makes we the media possible" are alone worth the effort to get through this book.

Others may understand individual technologies better than Gillmor, but it is unlikely that anyone has a better understanding of how they all--HTML,mail lists and forums,weblogs, wikis, SMS, mobile connected cameras, internet "broadcasting," peer to peer, RSS,Technorati, API, and many others--come to together to create a radically different architecture of information, news, personal reach, and circle of potential friends and allies for many millions of Americans.

This is not a book to be read and put aside. Gillmor clearly struggled to get his text into 241 pages, plus 36 pages of acknowledgements, websites, and detailed notes. While there is occasional redundancy, on the whole a longer book would have been clearer in some respects.

This is a book to be carefully studied and used as a springboard to continued learning about new applications, new technologies, and new interrelationships as they emerge.

The idea of the public as part of the media is not totally new.
Going back at least to the 1940's, public opinion research focused on the stages of influence: the mass media first influenced the opinion leaders in a community, who then influenced others by word of mouth.

What is new is the dramatically improved publishing capacity for the individual citizen, regardless of whether he or she had the community stature and web of influence to have been a community leader--formal or informal--in the past.

The media had been steadily eroding the influence of opinion leaders, by influencing more and more people directly, but now the opinion leaders are back in record-high numbers and with greatly expanded spheres of influence.

"I hope I've helped you understand how this media shift--this explosion of conversations--is taking place and where it is headed," Gllmour says on the last page of his book. "Most of all, I hope I've persuaded you to take up the challenge yourself.

"Your voice matters. Now, if you have something to say, you can be heard.

"You can make your own news. We all can.

"Let's get started."

Interesting read about the changes occurring in journalism... - 2006-07-16
Reviewer Rating:
If you ever wondered what is changing in journalism, then this book is for you. It not only describes the logging phenomenon, but also describes why the big media might not last.

Very Sensible and Interesting - 2006-10-15
Reviewer Rating:
Dan Gilmor here presents the attitude toward technology & journalism that any journalist will need to have if he/she will survive long in this new era. They need to embrace, or at least reckon with, the new media.

Here Gilmor gives an enlightening look at the changing face of journalism and the negative and positive changes it makes.

I'm not a professional journalist, but I found this book to be fascinating and informative. I credit it with helping me to stick with blogging, and seeing it as something more significant than a passing fad. All journalists should read this, I believe!

Great intro to possibilities - 2008-07-03
Reviewer Rating:
My online journalism class will read this book in the fall. It's a key text for introducing people to the possibilities in digital media and citizen journalism.

A neat topic - 2007-03-18
Reviewer Rating:
The book was a good guide to citizen media and gave some great examples of places where citizen media would work.

I enjoyed the examples thoroughly and found the book a useful guide. I can't wait for an updated version.

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