From Salon, a quick look at one person's view of how online journalism has changed in the past decade, focused on Slashdot. Andrew Leonard is the author, and he makes this good point, one many others would be smart to follow:
Incremental improvement assisted by reader feedback -- it's been my reporting motto ever since, and is the guiding principle of How the World Works. In thinking about how to participate in today's blogospheric conversation, in which every contribution is linked to, critiqued, praised, sliced and diced and redistributed all over the world, those early experiences with Slashdot proved to be an excellent learning template.
This truly is the promise of participatory journalism, and when it works, it's a marvelous thing. IMHO, it's working less well than it did 10 years ago (see my previous post), but I'll hold onto my shards of optimism.
I did giggle at this piece of prose from the Slashdot site:
Slashdot.org today announced the release of the Slashdot Firehose interface: a new content aggregation and management system that enables potential Slashdot content to be drawn from user submissions, bookmarks, journal entries, and RSS feeds in addition to the existing Slashdot editorial process....The Firehose interface expands content aggregation to include expanded data collection, increased user participation, and a versatile user interface that provides rich streams of news and information to Slashdot users.
As Leonard notes, we are sometimes doomed to become the thing we mock. The Slashdot community would be in hysterics about the marketing blah and doublespeak in that one paragraph -- it's enough to make your eyes cross!