"Journalism Next" Chapter 3

Crowd-powered collaboration refers to the phenomenon of reporters using their audience not merely as a receptacle for journalistic material but as a vital source for information.

Particularly in the age of the Internet, when "citizens can do their own hunting and gathering [online]" (Briggs, 68), such collaboration is an essential component of modern journalism.

Crowd-powered collaboration consists of several important elements:

• Crowdsourcing: Focusing the "community power" of Internet users on a particular task or story
• Open-source reporting: Briggs says that open-source reporting "refers to design, development and distribution 'offering practical accessibility to a product's source (goods and knowledge).'" (Briggs, 69) This means allowing readers opportunities to utilize the resources traditionally available only to professional journalists. 
• Pro-am journalism: Pro-am journalism allows the audience to post in the same format as the journalists. By distributing the means of publication, journalists ensure that more voices, even those with no qualification whatsoever to speak on matters of journalism, will be heard, and that stories will be enriched and/or polluted by a diverse group of contributors, each with his own unique perspective/uninformed bias.