One percent can make a difference

NYU Media professor Jay Rosen, speaking on a panel at “The Future of Civic Media “ conference at MIT this week, said his big learning from a recent project he spearheaded is that just one percent of citizens are willing to serve as citizen journalists obtaining and pouring through documents, reporting on meetings, interviewing sources and/or asking questions and then sharing what they find.
Rosen, well known as a big thinker and citizen journalism advocate, said with shrinking newsrooms, and for the good of Democracy, the need for amateur journalists is closer to 10 percent, portending a huge challenge for the news industry to organize and cultivate citizen journalists who work like professionals.
But even the one percent figure sounds good to me right now. At many newspapers, beats and areas of town that used to be covered are going dark, not because they’re not considered important but because editors just can't fund them.
So what if a newspaper in a community of 100,000 people organized and provided basic journalism training to one percent of citizens in its market? That would mean a hundred more people with the desire and at least some ability to provide information to the rest of the community.
So why isn’t that happening?
I suspect there are several answers, from just plain old time and money issues to concerns that the information just won’t be up to standards, requiring heavy editing and involvement from already harried front-line editors. Plus in my experience as a newsroom leader, it would need to be someone's full-time job to recruit the citizens, get them trained and then manage their efforts.
Still, it seems like an idea worth trying even on a small scale, perhaps in one county served by a zoned edition of a metro newspaper or at a small daily, with active websites.