Funferal

You Can with the BBC

A short piece in Poynter praises teh BBC‘s new iCan project as creating the participatory journalism that “newspapers that provide blogs to a few readers” have not, and cannot, provide.

The project is ambitious and impressive – it facilitates individuals and groups in mobilising local action to local issues. While the BBC obviously have a good eye for identifying the potential of technology for recasting their relationship with the public – witness their ‘photoblog’ of the global protests earlier this year – I hadn’t expected anything of quite of this scale or nature. I hope it succeeds, and they have a reasonable, simple, yet concise set of rules. I’m concerned however that they will face difficulty in policing the system. One rule that will be particularly troublesome will be the one that states that during election campaigns “there will be no new activity on any iCan campaigns which could influence those elections.”
Overall, however, a fascinating experiment, and one I will enjoy watching develop.