Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

A lot of people got taken aback by a PR Week study that showed that 52% of bloggers consider themselves journalists. I can see some people wringing their hands about this.

“Bloggers don’t have standards. They don’t have a code of ethics. Who are they beholden to?,” the naysayers will say.

But if anything, I see this great blogger/journalism explosion as an amazing opportunity for journalism and the media itself, here’s a few ways old-school media can take advantage of this.

1) Give more people a voice

Think of this mass of bloggers as a very engaged, very excited crowd. Take the opportunity to find interesting voices, unique voices and give them a big platform. Many bloggers would be happy for a bigger soapbox.

2) Lead the way

There is a massive wealth of journalism expertise in your average newsroom and journalism school. Engage bloggers and citizen journalists. Show them why accuracy, objectivity, research are important. Even better show them how to do this. A progressive non-profit or j-school could get some good press putting together a how-to package for bloggers looking to add a bit of credibility to their blogs.

3) The power of the network

Hypothetical scenario: You’re a national news website (or a newspaper) and you’re covering an election but there’s no way that you can have enough journalists to cover an entire country (or state for that matter). Engage bloggers to be on-the-ground correspondents to help you do this work. The results might not be perfect but in the right hands can be molded into something compelling and readable.

My former colleague Sarah Millar wrote about the study as well and tries to unpack the blogger/journalist dichotomy.

If you’ve been checking out my Sunday Image blog posts regularly you’ll notice that the Flickr Commons is one of my favourite sources. The Flickr Commons is a great resource if you’re into vintage photography. It invites institutions with large photo archives (museums, libraries, national archives, etc.) to upload parts of their collections to Flickr so the public can access them.

From time to time the museum crowdsources for annotations on photographs. So when a museum curator is unsure where a photo was taken they ask the crowd. Sometimes the crowd comes back with great and very accurate responses.

I’m also going to give a very jaunty tip of the hat to the blog Indicommons which explores the growing Flickr Commons by pointing out interesting content and new additions. I will also note that one of the editors of the Indicommons blog is Toronto editor and fellow book nerd Stephanie Fysh.

Photo: Possum with camera. From the Australian War Memorial Collection.