July 7, 2006

WKRN To Accept Bloggers' Video Stories For Air

Big news from WKRN today. I'll let Rex Hammock explain:

Michael Sechrist, general manager of Nashville's blog-friendly ABC affiliate, WKRN, announced that the station is starting an initiative to encourage bloggers to submit edited news or feature stories to the station, some of which will make it onto air and for which the bloggers/vloggers will be paid.

Terry Heaton has much more on WKRN's paradigm-shifting move...

Heaton:

Sechrist told the group of bloggers that they had already had a significant influence on the news programs the station produces, simply by doing what they do. The station has pursued stories first raised in the blogging community and has used local bloggers as a sounding board at various times.

This bold move reminds me of South Korea's OhmyNews! and its "every citizen is a reporter" slogan. By paying bloggers to conceive and produce stories that they feel are interesting, the station is following the "networked journalism" model noted by Jeff Jarvis earlier this week and the citizen journalism thinking of people such as Dan Gillmor.

I'm sure that we'll hear plenty of bitching about this from the trenches of the TV news business, but the truth is this was inevitable. Stations have always employed "stringers" or "freelancers," but most of their work was raw video that station reporters used to tell stories. This takes the concept a step further and taps into the knowledge, passion, brainpower and, yes, skill of people in the community. This is a fruit of the personal media revolution, and it will be interesting to watch.