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News tech: Participatory culture

The Weekly Dig, Boston's free counter culture newspaper, reported on the emergence of ANOTHER free counter culture newspaper that appears first next week.
http://www.weeklydig.com/news_opinions/articles/opening_up_the_floodgate...
To summarize: The newspaper will be made up entirely of reader-submitted blogs. Every week, the editors select the "best" ones they receive--but in a newsworthy move, they will do so live online. Readers can respond to the editorial board as they watch the feed; of course, the editors don't have to take the viewers' advice, but this is still a bold move. Lots of interesting things get decided in editorial board meetings, and this new paper wants to expose the decision making processes that happen at all papers.
Jenkins describes a future news which will bring you only what you're interested in; in this text, however, you get to contribute to a paper with a 200,000 weekly circulation (free at subway stops). By taking part of the editorial process, you don't have complete control over content, but are collaborating with others to make the best paper possible. I think I like this model better than just-for-you news. It keeps a sense of community, of shared prior culture, of a common background. It's a communal, Boston-based RSS feed--on paper. Convergence, indeed!
The article doesn't mention advertising or other fund-generation. Will readers get to select what ads they get to see later in the week? Can readers suggest which ads to reject? What does this do to our sense of agency as ad-viewers?

Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-04-12 10:51.
Amylea's blog

Community? Says who?
Adryan's picture
Submitted by Adryan on Tue, 2007-04-17 10:21.

I'm sure every person reading this has had an experience wherein the community-created text we would like to partake in gets co-opted by an undesirable community (tweenagers on myspace, BritSpear on "music" blogs). To me it all goes back to that damned "winner-takes-all" economics of attention. Either something so "indie" that I have no interest in it, or it's been flooded by those not quite so "cool" as myself. This cool-ism, Indier-than-thou, competative bull creates e-space as a constant battle zone in which we fight to maintain our place in the digital-culture pecking order. What's new about that?


I Wanna See an Ad for DB's Golden Banana (inside-joke)
mark p's picture
Submitted by mark p on Fri, 2007-04-13 07:36.

Wow, this is pretty nifty (and I'm officially in love with Boston now, so extra kudos to them). I am particularly interested in the ad questions you raise. How would this work? Would they get a list of potential businesses by name and then select to see the whole ad? Could this turn into a truly consumer-empowered culture where businesses could be punished (for what ever reason) by having their potentials to recieve attention revoked? Would this competition amongst potential businesses cause them to create more interesting, more ethical, or more info-based ads? No answers, plenty of questions!