We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People | 
 enlarge | Author: Dan Gillmor
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $16.99
Buy New: $5.99
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Rating:  30 reviews
Sales Rank: 110511
Media: Paperback
Pages: 334
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9 x 5.9 x 0.8
ISBN: 0596102275
Dewey Decimal Number: 320
EAN: 9780596102272
ASIN: 0596102275
Publication Date: January 24, 2006
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Product Description
"We the Media, has become something of a bible for those who believe the online medium will change journalism for the better." -Financial Times Big Media has lost its monopoly on the news, thanks to the Internet. Now that it's possible to publish in real time to a worldwide audience, a new breed of grassroots journalists are taking the news into their own hands. Armed with laptops, cell phones, and digital cameras, these readers-turned-reporters are transforming the news from a lecture into a conversation. In We the Media, nationally acclaimed newspaper columnist and blogger Dan Gillmor tells the story of this emerging phenomenon and sheds light on this deep shift in how we make--and consume--the news. Gillmor shows how anyone can produce the news, using personal blogs, Internet chat groups, email, and a host of other tools. He sends a wake-up call to newsmakers-politicians, business executives, celebrities-and the marketers and PR flacks who promote them. He explains how to successfully play by the rules of this new era and shift from "control" to "engagement." And he makes a strong case to his fell journalists that, in the face of a plethora of Internet-fueled news vehicles, they must change or become irrelevant. Journalism in the 21st century will be fundamentally different from the Big Media oligarchy that prevails today. We the Media casts light on the future of journalism, and invites us all to be part of it. Dan Gillmor is founder of Grassroots Media Inc., a project aimed at enabling grassroots journalism and expanding its reach. The company's first launch is Bayosphere.com, a site "of, by, and for the San Francisco Bay Area." Dan Gillmor is the founder of the Center for Citizen Media, a project to enable and expand reach of grassroots media. From 1994-2004, Gillmor was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. He has won or shared in several regional and national journalism awards. Before becoming a journalist he played music professionally for seven years.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 25 more reviews...
 Great intro to possibilities July 3, 2008
Lynn S. Clark (University of Colorado, United States)
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 March 18, 2007
R. Tesdell (Amman, Jordan)
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.
Very Sensible and Interesting October 15, 2006
Mark Nenadov (Lasalle, Ontario Canada)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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!
Interesting read about the changes occurring in journalism... July 16, 2006
Abdulmajed Dakkak (Toledo, OH USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
A Journalist Passionately Embraces the Internet June 21, 2006
Mark B. Cohen (Philadelphia,PA USA)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
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."
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