“Authority Has Been Replaced By Authenticity”

Authority has been replaced by authenticity as the currency of social journalism. The key to engaging with a community is to seek out those closest to the story. They rarely have a title but are people of standing within a community. They are guides to the wisdom within their crowd and interpreters of nuance: if you are verifying video from Syria you don’t want a foreign policy wonk, you want someone who can distinguish between a Damascus and a Homs accent.

From here, by Storify’s Mark Little.

There’s definitely something to this, I think; the way that social media has changed journalists’ interactions with sources, and where they find sources. I’m not exactly a fan of the “LazyWeb” crowdsourcing of listicles (“Hey, Twitter! What are the Top 10 [Insert Subject Here]!” is something it always makes me mad to see out there, because it’s… well, lazy, but I know that I have found multiple sources via social media that would’ve eluded me otherwise, and different types of sources, too.

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