We, the Citizen Journalists of Singapore

March 30, 2007 Blog 4 comments

Crowdsourcing the Media

Recently tackled as part of Nexus 2007, “Crowdsourcing the Media” looked at how citizen journalism was changing the dynamics of the media landscape. It saw social media provocateur Kevin Lim moderating a session with online media luminaries Kathy Teo of CNET Networks, Jennifer Lewis of SPH‘s STOMP, and James Seng, Editor extraordinaire of tomorrow.sg (Left to right above).

Discussions centred around citizen journalism and its various forms (youtube, wikipedia etc) and included fascinating insights into how CNET and STOMP operated. As Jennifer puts it, there tend to be more “loser-generated” rather than “user-generated” content, and she does get her fair share of junk being MMS-ed and SMS-ed to her via 75557.
A key term being bandied about was the “wisdom of crowds”. It was felt that with more and more Singaporeans participating in blogs and online forums, their collective voices may be a greater force to reckon with compared to the old mainstream media dominated days.

An interesting point raised was that the average Londoner reads about 3.5 newspapers a day. This means that they get their information from different sources. Compare this to Singapore with only one dominant press, and we can see why citizen journalism and blogs are so popular here. People simply want to hear from alternative sources, and this is where platforms like STOMP, tomorrow.sg, and ping.sg comes in.

The session ended with a most interesting exchange between tomorrow.sg’s James, ping.sg supporter ClappingTrees and its creator Uzyn. I am glad that it ended somewhat amicably, with both parties agreeing that competition is good for the Singapore blogosphere. There can never be one blog aggregator too many here!

For more, read Kevin’s comprehensive post here.

By Walter
Founder of Cooler Insights, I am a geek marketer with almost 24 years of senior management experience in marketing, public relations and strategic planning. Since becoming an entrepreneur 5 years ago, my team and I have helped 58 companies and over 2,200 trainees in digital marketing, focusing on content, social media and brand storytelling.

4 Comments

  1. Nexus 2007 sounds interesting. I have been reading a few blogs which posted write-ups on it.

    Voices from the blogosphere cannot be ignored. And we are getting louder each day huh! 🙂

    oh, I haven’t been reading ST for 2 months! 🙂

  2. Thanks, Walter, for the very factual mention. Yes, there can never be one blog aggregator too many here!

    btw, could you change “Clapping Trees” to just one word “ClappingTrees”? It’s more unique and so searchable that way.

  3. eastcoastlife,

    Nexus was certainly a unique experience for me, though it wasn’t all fun and games. Certain sessions were so boring that I was nodding over. I guess its also because of my sleep debt after “chionging” non stop at work for the rest of the week.

    For me, I have to read ST every day as part of my work though I usually skim over most of the articles due to lack of time.

  4. clappingtrees,

    Thanks for popping over to Cooler Insights. You do have an interesting blog and an even more interesting name for the blog. Will change the name accordingly.

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