Jeff Jarvis imagines the future of news

The future of news:

So imagine that a local news organization -- one of the incumbents or a new competitor -- becomes an aggregator of: News -- Staff still reports, writes, and edits what they do best. But we also link to, syndicate, promote, and support the work of citizen journalists. To the public, we provide a means to get all the news we can find (a new slogan in the About.com era). We are the starting point (for some), the organizer (for some). But we no longer pretend to do it all. It's distributed news. We even help citizen journalists to join together to report stories: The one tangible suggestion out of this confab came from Jay Rosen, who said that one reporter somewhere will show how open-source journalism will work, bringing together the effort and expertise of the crowd. We can provide support to these "information entrepreneurs," as one of the group called them: advertising revenue (see below), tools, training (the BBC is starting a journalism school for the people; shouldn't and couldn't any local newspaper be that?). And they need not only write stories. Their reporting could be videotaping the board of ed meetings; it could be getting a senior citizens' club to report on prices in every grocery store; it could be pulling together Little League scores.