An Introduction or Blogging in the Shadow of Henry Jenkins

Oooo! A first post! I'm Jason Haas, a Researcher at the Education Arcade. My main focus is work on our collaboration with NBC News' iCue project, helping them to evaluate the design and implementation of their forthcoming educational offering. One of the projects we've worked on for them is to help develop a framework to support student journalism.

It is with interest then, that we see stories like this emerge:

MTV wants digital army to bring back the buzz

One of the things that interested me the most however was the following:

The most immediate challenge, media analysts say, will be upholding journalistic standards that aren't needed for MTV's typical diet of reality programming while also letting citizen journalists do their own thing.

"If MTV controls it too much, it will become like anything else," said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University. "If they control it too little, they might not get anything valuable back."

As major corporations and news organizations begin to try to harness user-generated content for their own ends, there is a very interesting opportunity (and arguably an obligation) for them to mentor the people they are depending on for their content. But at the same time, one of the reasons they are recruiting outside journalists is to escape their own local culture and strictures. As a result, these corporations have a real opportunity to review and potentially change their own journalistic practice. It will be as interesting to see what effects these deputies have on their sheriffs as the sheriffs on the deputies.