I spent yesterday afternoon in Oxford talking to BBC journalists, producers and editors about the threats to public interest journalism and the Fourth Estate (imagine how few news organisations would not only make time to talk about this, but where journalists would turn up and discuss it - good old BBC), and realised - after having left, that I'd forgotten to talk about the exciting bit. There's so much to worry about in news it's easy to forget that the revolution in media is as exciting as it is scary.
Central to this - and where the BBC plays a critical role - is the reconstitution of what's traditionally been known as the 'Fourth Estate'. What I mean by this is the massive explosion in the number of people doing what they consider journalism, but who don't call themselves journalists. Maybe they take the occasional photo and send it to the BBC, or write a blog about an event they go to, or do some digging about some local scandal.
The exciting bit, and the bit I hope the BBC will play a big part in, is harnessing this amazing explosion by giving people the tools and advice to help them become informal constituents of this new Fourth Estate. This occurred to me when on the way back I was reading excerpts from Demos' study about the 'Pro-Am Revolution':
"...in the last two decades" Demos writes, "a new breed of amateur has emerged: the Pro-Am, amateurs who work to professional standards. These are not the gentlemanly amateurs of old - George Orwell's blimpocracy, the men in blazers who sustained amateur cricket and athletics clubs. The Pro-Ams are knowledgeable, educated, committed and networked by new technology. The twentieth century was shaped by large hierarchical organisations with professionals at the top. Pro-Ams are creating new, distributed organisational models that will be innovative, adaptive, and low cost"
Imagine if the BBC built the tools to enable these 'Pro-Ams' to do some of the jobs journalists would like to do but just don't have time: to search through health statistics, to look at local councillors records, to look at public sector budgets. Many might use them just for their own benefit, but in doing so they could turn up things no single journalist would have time to look for. MySociety have built tools like this to enable people to scrutinize MPs (TheyWorkForYou), and more recently on to report local problems - FixMyStreet (broken drains, cracked pavements).
Isn't this something the BBC could do too? And, if it did, wouldn't it harness the power of an army of local and specialist journalists?
Keywords: BBC, Fourth Estate, MySociety, Oxford, public interest