If you are a paid journalist, please cover your eyes. What I am about to write may cause internal bleeding.

Have you heard the aphorism that states that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually type all of the great works of literature – plus a few episodes of Jackass to boot?

In our role as gadflies of social media, we will soon be conducting an experiment in citizen journalism that a real journalist might characterize as monkeys with typewriters . The question we will endeavor to answer is this: Can non-journalists create near-professional news content using social media technology? ( I can hear teeth grinding already.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

The idea is simple enough. Select a news subject such as “City Council Investigates Neighborhood Planning Process (Yawn)”.  Using social media collaboration technology, encourage the creation of short term networks of individuals whose goal is to create content around said subject. Will such networks be created spontaneously fueled solely by reader interest and will those networks create content improved by the collaboration process? Or will content created this way be driven by narrow self-interest and misinformation?  Our guess is both.

The second part of this experiment is to investigate ways to avoid the latter result and encourage the former.

One potential indicator of what the results might be is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a “web-based, free-content encyclopedia project … that anyone with Internet access can make changes to”.  Essentially, it is a giant collaboration project whose collaborators are all of us and the result is a pretty good encyclopedia.

We are currently setting up our own Wiki site, using the same software ( MediaWiki ) that Wikipedia uses. Our collaborators will come from Montana citizens who read newspapers or visit local news websites.

Once our wiki is ready for prime time, we will launch the experiment with a half dozen or so suggested topic. Each of the topics will have different sets of rules to govern how the collaboration will proceed.  Some will be wide open while others are more regulated.

Why, you might ask, are we doing this?  Are we trying to take jobs away from real journalists?  No.  But the reality of the situation is that news content has taken a hit in recent years, both in quality and quantity.  Trying to stay viable, news organizations are opting for style over substance and advertising over editorial content. Collaborative news content could increase community involvement while providing more content to struggling news organizations.

There is still a lot to do before we’re ready to launch our experiment in citizen journalism and we need your help.

If you have wiki experience (technical) and or journalism credentials and would like to work on this project, please contact me