Business Organizations and Collaborative Web:

Practices, Strategies and Patterns

Kamna Malik U21Global Graduate School, Singapore Praveen K. Choudhary HCL Technologies, India

Senior Editorial Director: Director of Book Publications: Editorial Director: Acquisitions Editor: Development Editor: Production Editor: Typesetters: Print Coordinator: Cover Design:

Kristin Klinger Julia Mosemann Lindsay Johnston Erika Carter Mike Killian Sean Woznicki Jennifer Romanchak and Natalie Pronio Jamie Snavely Nick Newcomer

Published in the United States of America by Business Science Reference (an imprint of IGI Global) 701 E. Chocolate Avenue Hershey PA 17033 Tel: 717-533-8845 Fax: 717-533-8661 E-mail: cust@igi-global.com Web site: http://www.igi-global.com/reference Copyright 2011 by IGI Global. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without written permission from the publisher. Product or company names used in this set are for identification purposes only. Inclusion of the names of the products or companies does not indicate a claim of ownership by IGI Global of the trademark or registered trademark. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Business organizations and collaborative web: practices, strategies and patterns / Kamna Malik and Praveen K. Choudhary, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: This book delves into identifying specific business processes and their linkage with the collaborative Web, while understanding the related implications for individuals, organizations and society--Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-1-60960-581-0 (hbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-60960-582-7 (ebook) 1. Information technology--Management. 2. Web 2.0. 3. Internet. 4. Online social networks. I. Malik, Kamna, 1967- II. Choudhary, Praveen, 1974- III. Title. HD30.2.B8784 2011 658.403802854678--dc22 2011001301

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. All work contributed to this book is new, previously-unpublished material. The views expressed in this book are those of the authors, but not necessarily of the publisher.

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Collaborative Journalism:
Networks, News Media and the Public Sphere
Saayan Chattopadhyay University of Calcutta, India

Chapter 4

ABSTRACT
Journalists responsibility has an intrinsic relation with the economic and socio-political institutions within which they work. To bring the notion of collaboration into the discussion of journalism and news media organization irrespective of whether it is technological or social would thus broaden its conventional intention of studying the social dynamics by which news is produced within key social institutions, and ultimately to propose a method for correlating the changing facets due to collaborative Web with established theories of the relationship between discourse, professional practices, and economic endeavors. What this chapter argues is that collaboration does not hinge only between a professional and an amateur, or trained reporters and common citizens, or perhaps more commonly, different kinds of media; rather, it is a much greater transformation since it is a collaboration between society and technology with its palpable economic implications. In this context, this chapter attempts to understand the emergence of network entrepreneur and his/her engagement with the multiple discursive and institutional networks. By referring to various mainstream and alternative news media organizations in India and beyond, this chapter questions in what way news media and journalistic practices are reconfiguring to accommodate a more collaborative platform that embraces participatory, networked, hypermediated journalism.
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-581-0.ch004

Copyright 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

Collaborative Journalism

INTRODUCTION
In the past decade and a half, we have begun to witness a radical change in the organization of information production. Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a fundamental transformation of how one constitutes the information environment one occupies as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. A string of changes in the technology, economic organization, and social practices of production within this environment has created emerging opportunities for how we produce, disseminate and exchange information, knowledge, and culture. The transformation brought about by the collaborative networked information environment is deep-seated that brings fundamental structural changes. It points to the very basis of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries. At present there are more than 60,000 titles registered as newspapers in India; almost 9,000 of these are being published on a regular basis. Besides, there are more than one hundred national television channels and hundreds of local channels, as well as large number of private radio stations especially in the metros (Audit Bureau of Circulation, 2006). Parallel to this, within the ambit of what is popularly known as new media there is consistent development that presently rivals the traditional media segments as well. Most of the established media organizations have already stepped in to the new media sector, with web and mobile services. Websites like indiatimes. com, manoramaonline.com, hindutantimes.com, rediff.com, in.com, merinews.com, oneindia.in, sulekha.com have created a niche for themselves. Indian media have outperformed the overall Indian economy; they are expected to be over US$18.6 billion by 2010. Nonetheless, in keeping with the corporatization of journalism, web journalism in India has essentially become an

extension of the already established news media business, predominantly producing, among other things, market-friendly soft stories and popular syndicated content. However, disagreements continue to unfold regarding which website deserves to be acknowledged as news website, with different interested parties each staking their respective claim. This controversy stems primarily from disagreements over how best to define what constitutes a news site as distinct from other related types of sites. Much of the early, experimental work was conducted by newspaper companies placing their news reports online, thereby blurring some might say remediating traditional categories. Somewhat crudely, I suggest that Indian news media sites can be categorized into four different groups. The first group consists of the sites that are primarily Web extensions of the existing print media publication or news agencies: timesofindia. com, manoramaonline.com, hindustantimes.com, hinduonnet.com, indianexpress.com, tehelka. com and ptinews.com. The second comprises sites that are similar extensions of the recognized news broadcast media: ibnlive.in.com, ndtv.com, timesnow.tv, zeenews.com and aajtak.com. The third is the purely online news sites, which, besides Google and Yahoo! India news services, include merinews.com, india-newsbehindnews.com, indiatogether.com and indianews.net. The fourth is the news portals, which are relatively popular in terms of traffic ranking: rediff.com, indiatimes. com, sify.com, oneindia.in, 123india.com and so on (Chattopadhyay, 2010, p. 293). Within this perspective, in this chapter I examine a particular intersection of the emerging collaborative practices within the domain of web journalism and the more pervasive changes being perceptible in socio-economic sphere. These changes have most visibly affected the journalistic practices or the production of news both by individuals and by cooperative efforts in a wide range of loosely or tightly woven collaborations. However, the social significance of such col-

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laborative engagement and its allied economic consequence can never be overemphasized. In this changing scenario, this chapter questions the predominant world view that predictably and rigidly disassociates the natural/social from the technical; and the individual from the technology. New media do not just provide a new voice; rather, they provide the ability to fabricate new linkages of institutions, individuals and machines. These new linkages can be witnessed across the domain of online journalism, in the open source community and in a variety of other collaborative journalistic practices as well. What this chapter seeks to argue is that the notion of collaboration does not hinge only between a professional and an amateur, or trained reporters and common citizens, or perhaps more commonly, different kinds of media rather it is a much greater transformation since it is a collaboration between society and technology with its palpable economic implications. As the networks become simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society (Latour, 1993, p.6); and the human beings emerge as Homo Sapiens Technologicus, the collaboration entails far reaching implications that not only questions the given categories of modernity but also reconstitute them. Hence, it is not only individualistic isolated communicative nodes rather a complex negotiation of linkages that engenders the hybridity of this medium and calls for new practices, strategies and patterns.

COLLABORATION FOR A NEW PUBLIC SPHERE?

Jrgen Habermas introduced the concept of the public sphere as a sphere which mediates between society and state, where the public organizes itself as the bearer of public opinion, accords with the principle of the public sphere which once had to be fought for against the arcane policies of monarchies and which since that time has made possible the democratic control of state activities

(Habermas, 1989, p.136). It is first of all a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body (Ibid.). He also contended that this bourgeois public sphere went into decline after the consolidation of the bourgeois hegemony. However, the scholar chiefly credited for introducing the public sphere notion into the media debate was Nicholas Garnham. He suggested that a market allocation of cultural resources, combined with the destruction of public service media, threatened public communication, which he argued, lay at the heart of the democratic process (Garnham, 1986, p.37). Garnham pointed to a string of negatives associated with this process of commercialization, namely, a growing focus on privatized domestic consumption built around the television set, the creation of information rich and information poor sectors and the replacement of national cultural spheres with an international media market (p.38). Certainly, Habermas like Garnham and other cultural interventionists were deeply concerned at the growing commercialization of the media; hence naturally, at heart, the public sphere issue seems to be about creating alternatives to one-dimensional, narrowed, manipulated or closed communication. It is important to note, the two crucial shifts that mark the most advanced economies of the world today. The first shift, is towards an economy centered on information that includes financial services, accounting, software, science and news and cultural, comprising of films, music production and also news. The second move is towards a communication environment built on inexpensive processors with high computation capabilities, interconnected in a pervasive networkthe phenomenon we associate with the Internet. The collaborative environment, which seems to be the center of new practices, strategies and patterns for news media organizations,

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is only possible because of these shifts. And echoing Benkler, I assume that it fundamentally reshaped the notion of public sphere: from the mass-mediated public sphere to a networked public sphere (Benkler, 2006, p.10). Although, whether it offers a platform for better democratic participation; as a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture (Ibid., p.2) is a position that I may find difficult to concur. However what is more crucial for this study is to identify the very ambivalent nature of this collaborative environment. On one hand, the linkages of various communicative nodes are much more perceptible in the domain of news media on the web; on the other hand, these nodes remain as individualistic and as discrete as possible. For instance if we consider the citizen journalism section in Indian news websites like ibnlive.in or merinews.com the reports, photos and videos come from locations which are generally known, if not the hometown of that particular citizen reporter. What he reports is something that he personally finds interesting or amusing, which is directly opposite to the assignments that the professional journalist are assigned to cover. It is his private, personal involvement to something or some event that if he finds the opportunity he attempts to make public. Similarly, the controversy involving an Indian Minister of State and an active Twitter user, who ran into trouble for a message he posted on the social networking site in which he commented sarcastically in response to a query tweet from a journalist, points to this very aspect. The ministers remark was meant as a humorous private and personal reply, as he himself mentioned later, but the underlying reason for the political commotion ensuing from his tweet was the clear and rigid distinction between the public and the private, that the ministers comment somewhat deviated. What I wish to suggest is that although the technology is increasingly adapting to the collaborative, participatory environment but the collaboration between the public and the private remains distant. Such collaboration would entail

a breakdown of these distinctions and perhaps while attempting to create a new public sphere we might have ended up creating a new private sphere.

JOURNALISM 2.0: NEW PRACTICES, STRATEGIES AND PATTERNS

Irrespective of whether it is a new public sphere or a private sphere, the notion of collaboration undeniably remains at the heart of the debate regarding the possibilities of new technologies, particularly the web, to facilitate new forms of participation in economic and public life, to reform political debate and citizenship and to rekindle the institutions of democracy. Although, since the inception of the internet the utopian visions of the internet was instrumental in this sense of optimism centered on participation and politics. But it has been reinvigorated recently through the discussion around, what is popularly being termed as Web 2.0. In this post-broadcast, digital collaborative media era, the notions of journalism and journalists are also transformed - defined by new alignments of productive and distributive power and media consumption and use; hence, necessitating, perhaps too admiringly, an expression: Journalism 2.0. The term obviously connotes a sense of up gradation from the older practices and concepts. Then what are the transformations brought about through this new-fangled practices of journalism? Certainly there are some structural changes, which have affected the patterns of the news media organizations in the twenty-first century. To what the extent print/broadcast and web journalism should be integrated continued to be at the center of industry discussions all through the late 1990s and into the new millennium. The rising influence of the web on national news reporting and the continuing pressure online technologies brought to bear on newsroom operations compelled more newspapers to mull over how to best integrate their print newspaper and online news services

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(Compton, 2010; Allan, 2006; Noack, 1998,). Here it is imperative to recollect how in the last few years almost all the established print and broadcast news media organizations in India have integrated new web based content and services ranging from microblogging, citizen reporting sections and the option of commenting on the reported stories by readers in their sites. Indeed, it was becoming increasingly evident that the success of the typically smaller online operations was necessarily dependent on tapping the talents and newsgathering resources of the vastly larger print newsroom (Paul, 2000). Perhaps that is why, even small and mid segment local newspapers in India, like Aajkaal or Sangbad Pratidin in Bengali language also have their own websites; and which is usually available in vernacular languages. However, in developed countries, after some experimenting, newspapers that had established stand-alone new media divisions began reversing course and looking to integrate their online section with the mainstream, offline news section. In 2008, Gannett Co., a leading international news and information company that publishes 85 daily newspapers in the USA, including USA Today, acquired Ripple6, Inc., a leading provider of social media services and went through a restructuring of its business and subsequently in 2009 Gannetts online network, ended up with more than 100 digital communities and a combined reach of approximately 25 million people that amounted to ten percent of its revenues (Connell, 2008). There exist a considerable number of approaches to the study of the necessity for collaboration between the online and offline news media. In their research on managing emerging technologies, Day and Schoemaker (2000) found that one of the fundamental mistakes that companies make when establishing an innovative venture, like launching a news site, is to ignore the connections and possible collaboration between it and the existing parent operation. Clark (2001) and Zollman (2000) asserted that integration or collaboration offers synergies that facilitate marketing and financial

advantages other than assisting in improved journalistic practices. However, such collaboration entails, as I have earlier mentioned, certain structural changes; but what are the stages through which these structural changes are initiated in the news media organizations? Drawing upon Everett M. Rogers influential scholarship on diffusion of innovations, Lawson-Borders applied it to study media organizations and new technology, while developing the following trajectory: the first stage, known as the agenda-setting points to the early period, when media companies recognized the implications of the Internet and the growth of the personal computer; the second stage, designated as matching refers to the consequent formation of online divisions to exploit the potential of the world wide communication network; the third stage, redefining/restructuring refers to the infamous dot.com bust in early 2000, when web media organizations retrenched and economized online resources; and the fourth stage, clarifying, points to the growing importance of convergence, as journalists start being familiar with delivering news through multiple new media technologies. In the fifth stage, known as routinizing, which is particularly pertinent for this study, the innovation becomes an ongoing part of the organizations activities. Finally, the fifth stage is still unfolding for media organizations as they deliberate over strategies and best practices to propel the organizations into the future (Lawson-Borders, 2003, p.93). What kinds of emerging strategies and practices are we witnessing? The notion of journalism 2.0 sees the Internet as allowing enthusiastic communities and individuals to come together and provide more value for a given news and information site. Here I hasten to remind that the initial reports of 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attack first came through social networking sites and blogs. Mere moments after the first shots were fired, Twitter users in India and particularly in Mumbai were delivering almost instant eyewitness accounts of the situation. Furthermore, it is suspected that at

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the height of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the Indian government attempted to shutdown the Twitter stream people were using to disseminate news and information, amid fears that it could be used by the terrorists to help them evade capture (Beaumont, 2008). I am not, of course, suggesting that Twitter, Facebook Myspace and other social media are in a position to replace the mainstream news media yet; however, there can be little doubt that they offer a potent collaborative communication platform that is emerging even in a developing nation like India. An analogous emerging practice is crowdsourcing that effectively demonstrates how a large group of unpaid, non-professional but committed individuals can outperform a small group of experienced and paid professionals. Crowdsourcing is a relatively new term, coined by Jeff Howe in a 2006 article for Wired News. It is quite similar to distributed, collaborative or open-source reporting and many scholars and professionals use the terms interchangeably. It is often referred as pro-am journalism a portmanteau of professional and amateur. The focus of crowdsourcing is usually ongoing production of information while distributed reporting or opensource reporting relates more closely to a specific and fixed-time project, such as responding to a specific query or reporting on a specific subject. The online version of Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, cannot keep up with Wikipedia in terms of updating articles and information. And Microsoft, with all its resources, has struggled to keep pace with the development of the Firefox browser, a project powered by volunteers collaborating together under the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation (Briggs, 2007, p.47). Rediff.com, like Yahoo Answers includes a specific link ask users with every news story, where the reader can ask any question related to the article or otherwise to other users of the site who may provide the answer. And not to mention, most of the websites of established Indian news media

organizations include citizen report sections that in effect depends on crowdsourcing. The practice of news reporting has adapted and changed significantly to make use of the possibilities of the new media environment. For instance, the notion of micro-reporting, sometimes also referred as hyper-local reporting takes into consideration events and developments normally neglected by mainstream media. Hence, the news and information pertaining to small towns and remote locales, which hitherto did not receive adequate coverage, are being reported on a regular basis. Likewise, the notion of distributed reporting is a form of transparency for a news organization. Traditionally, readers learn about stories a news organization is working on only when the articles are finished and published. While it is customary to keep a story idea secret to prevent the competition from running with the idea, the distributed reporting model requires a news organization to go public with a story idea early in the reporting process. The reason? To allow readers to assist in the reporting of the story (Briggs, 2007, p.48). In addition, the nature of the news story has changed considerably beyond the push-pull concern of the early online reporting. Instead of being a singular article, the news story, nowadays, has become a thread that involves multiple authors often yielding multiple related articles. The readers are actively involved even before the publication of a particular news report, as they ask questions, write comments and supplement information through the interactive, participatory web media. Besides, the readers also collaborate in the promotion and dissemination of the news report through the concept of peer-recommended news as certain services like emailing the news, RSS feeds or social bookmarking are becoming ubiquitous. Hence, collaborative media do not just provide a new voice; rather, they provide the collaborative potential to fabricate new linkages of institutions, individuals and machines. Such transformations have also ushered in new patterns of production, which Yochai Ben-

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kler (2006) identifies as nonmarket production. There is a large number of individuals often comprising of artists, scientists, politicians, businessmen, and professionals belonging to various sectors who contribute to Wikipedia, citizen journalism sites, blogs, social bookmarking sites or post comments in news-sites who are collectively producing works of clear economic value but are, for the most part, not participating in an economic market as such. As Benkler (2006, p.3) notes, these new patterns of productionnonmarket and radically decentralized will emerge, if permitted, at the core, rather than the periphery of the most advanced economies. It promises to enable social production and exchange to play a much larger role, alongside property- and marketbased production, than they ever have in modern democracies.

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY: SOCIETY, TECHNOLOGY AND JOURNALISM

What this collaboration has in stake for society? It is clear that these changes may seem minute, isolated and perhaps trivial but if one looks at the macro level then it may unravel certain notions that go beyond media and journalism and affects how society itself is constituted. To this end we can constructively draw insight from the body of sociological work known as STS (science, technology, and society), or, more specifically, actor-network theory (ANT). One of the basic insights of sociologists such as Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law, is that what we understand as the social consists of much more than purely human actors. Humans are thus intricately networked with machines, software, texts, objects, databases and so on. What we call the social is materially heterogeneous: talk, bodies, texts, machines, architectures, all of these and many more are implicated in and perform the social (Law, 1994, p.2).

To put it more simply, actor-network theory as explained by Bruno Latour (1992) attempts to analyze a series of negotiations, which explains the progressive constitution of a network in which both human and non-human actors take on identities according to established strategies of interaction. Actors identities and qualities are defined during negotiations between representatives of human and non-human actants. What they term an actant can be anything endowed with the ability to act, including people and material objects. Actors and actants, both terms are, however, occasionally used interchangeably and actor and network are mutually constitutive. An actor can not act without a network and a network always consists of actors. Journalism, especially in the new media environment, as a network of actors can therefore be extended to include a whole series of objects, artifacts, and technologies. This development can be seen as a hybrid collectivity of human and nonhuman components, and thus we can sidestep the mistake of understanding it as constituted purely by one or the other. This, I suggest, permits us to realize the complexity of web journalism as it visibly collapses the rigid categorizations that are pivotal in the understanding of modern journalism. The list of different technologies and objects one may incorporate in this actor-network of web journalism is potentially endless. However, certain artifacts and technologies like the digital imaging devices, internet, mobile phones are of particular importance, but what must be recognized as actor-network theorists argue is their agency or active status. In attempting to move away from static properties and the purity of divides and distinctions, Latour (1993) argues that the agency of technologies and artifacts does not lie in the essence, in the nature, of an object, but is an effect, an outcome of a set or series of relations. This notion of relational agency means that the internet, digital cameras, or digital communication devices are only an agent inasmuch as series of associa-

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tions are made and subsequently held together. This active status of these new media devices is an effect of these relations and associations. As Bruno Latour (2005, p.247) remarks, The question of the social emerges when the ties in which one is entangled begin to unravel; the social is further detected through the surprising movements from one association to the next; those movements can either be suspended or resumed; when they are prematurely suspended, the social as normally construed is bound together with already accepted participants called social actors who are members of a society; when the movement toward collection is resumed, it traces the social as associations through many non-social entities which might become participants later; if pursued systematically, this tracking may end up in a shared definition of a common world, what I have called a collective; but if there are no procedures to render it common, it may fail to be assembled; and, lastly, sociology is best defined as the discipline where participants explicitly engage in the reassembling of the collective. Hence, consistent with a world view that habitually and steadfastly separates the natural from the mechanical and the actor from the action, naturally journalists and those who study journalism routinely separate news and newsmakers, reporters and audience, press and politics. Nevertheless, as I have earlier stated, these categorizations are starting to disintegrate in practice. As new media technologies increasingly occupy the ambit of journalism, they necessitate a new trajectory of theorization, like actor-network theory with which to comprehend the production and circulation of public discourse and for the role of what Latour and others might call socio-technical hybrids in the process. Web journalism in turn offers actornetwork theory not only a new site at which to observe the close readings of social life, but a new professional domain in which to develop the implications of its studies of science and technology

for the study of media, discourse and governance. Like scientists, journalists have long collaborated in the production of social order. And like scientists, they have done their work in relation to economic and political institutions that their work in turn has helped shape (Turner, 2005, p.322).

NETWORK ENTREPRENEUR AND COLLABORATIVE JOURNALISM IN INDIA

This collaboration of multiple discursive and institutional networks also entails an entrepreneurial aspect. Over the last decade, news media and journalistic practices are reconfiguring to accommodate a more collaborative platform that embraces participatory, networked, hypermediated journalism. While, the traditional newsroom is going through an organizational restructuring, as I have mentioned earlier, the conventional news organization and its business interests are gradually shifting towards this presumably more prospective segment. It is noteworthy to mention here, one such collaborative news media initiative in India NewsRack.in. Developed by Subramanya Sastry, a web developer, the site lets users specify certain filtering rules which are used to select relevant articles from incoming news feeds. The selected articles are then classified into various categories. The users create their own profile on NewsRack and save news stories under different categories. They also have an option to browse public news archives prepared by other users. To a certain extent, NewsRack has an advantage over the news aggregator of Google or Yahoo. Although it is simple to search for general news on the Google, but when it comes to subject-specific news items it is not all that competent. Google displays a handful of categories in which all news is classified; whereas, in NewsRack the categories are defined by users so, there is no limit on the number of categorization for any news item.

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The scheme of NewsRack complicates the traditional understanding of journalism and news. In journalism and much of journalism studies, actors generally come in three categories: sources, journalists and reader/viewer; albeit all of them are human but the members of any one group might at times be members of the others; however, they are treated as analytically divergent. Each one acts as a link in a chain sources disclose information, journalists collect and package it as news, and readers receive and consume it. Information itself moves through a series of representations although reasonably unaffected. This framework in turn endorses what Michael Schudson (2003) has called the information-based model of citizenship, in which citizens are supposed to act rationally at the voting booth on the basis of the news and information journalists have delivered to them. NewsRack, and its founder Subramanya Sastry along with other volunteer-contributors, in contrast serve as news gatherer, news source, and audience member all at once. Their engagement confuses the analytical categories on which traditional journalism studies have long depended. However, considered along the framework of actor-network theory, Sastry and all the others who contribute in the filtering and archiving of the news in various categories and of course his web sitecan be seen to represent and form a part of an actor-network. These actors and actants do not merely deliver news through the web site; on the contrary, they and the network in which they collaborate translate it into something new. Collectively they constitute a hybrid, an actor-network of news which, as Latour (1993, p.6) claimed of all networks, simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society. In this perspective we may consider Subramanya Sastry, as what Ronald Burt would term a network entrepreneur and his site emerges as a form of actor-network. Being a network entrepreneur, Subramanya Sastry negotiates between mul-

tiple discursive and institutional networks and his website translates a range of news stories produced within that network and put into further circulation. In that way, Subramanya Sastry assembles NewsRack not as something like a newspaper or television news channel that is, an independent account of events and information rather, more like a sphere for public discussion. This discussion, nonetheless, predominantly permits network members, who may or may not be a representatives of the press but they collectively classify, organize, filter and disseminate news which are coming from established news media; hence together it can be seen to construct new linkages of institutions, economy, individuals and technology. A more institutionalized form of such effort is the first Indian website wholly devoted to citizen journalism, merinews.com. Founded by Vipul Kant Upadhyay, merinews.com clearly states, People to People (P2P) interaction is of paramount importance and rather inevitable. Emanating from the need to empower democracy by providing a media to the people of the country to communicate with one and all, www.merinews. com is an effort to provide one such platform to interact and express. It is a news platform for collective wisdom, Of The People, By The People, For The People. Merinews.com, like the celebrated South Korean citizen journalism site, ohmynews.com, is based on the concept of participatory, collaborative journalism which transcend beyond the limitations of conventional media and allows citizens of the country to report, read, write, comment and debate news, views - happenings they find significant (Merinews, 2010). The site does not simply offer new conduits for the dissemination of news; rather these networks and their human collaborators, collaborate in the creation of new socio-technical formations. New media do not just offer professionals like Vipul Kant Upadhyay and Subramanya Sastry a new medium; rather, they

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offer them the ability to foster new networks that can be witnessed across the world of web journalism, open source reporting, crowdsourcing, and in a variety of other journalistic practices and emerging technologies. A similar effort is idishoom.com, which is the only media movement of its kind in India that is essentially run by voluntary citizen editors and reporters, who as responsible and concerned citizens have created idishoom as a platform to raise a collective voice against social inequities and injustice. Over the last three years idishoom. com has been receiving considerable popularity especially among the urban youth of India and now claims to have over two million subscribers. Another, such collaborative initiative, Instablogs is a news ecosystem bringing bloggers, citizen journalists and traditional media together. Founded in 2005 by Ankit and Nandini Maheshwari, originally, the plan was to launch a global-local network of fifty news-based blogs but presently it features a diverse community of news reporters, business owners, college students, housewives, artists, parents, and more in different countries and regions (Instablogs, 2010). Considered in this way, several Facebook or Ning communities or other social media groups can be conceived as similar but informal instances of collaborative journalism that not only stand to address the political world but also points to emerging entrepreneurial aspects. Notwithstanding the fact that nonmerket production dominates collaborative peer-production project till date but we merely need to recognize that the material conditions of production in the networked information economy have transformed in ways that enhance the relative significance of social sharing and exchange as a modality of economic production (Benkler, 2005, p.92).

CONCLUSION
This chapter is an attempt to investigate the nature of the claims that speak of the ways in which the users of online news are reconstituting the paradigms which have traditionally governed journalism and journalists. What counts as journalism in the networked, open-source society is open to negotiation, with fluidly changing points of convergence and divergence between its practice in the mainstream and in the margins. If a modern understanding of journalism assumes a distinct division between individuals, institutions and technology and their respective forms of agency, the collaborative journalistic practices on the web allow to recognize the socio-technical hybrids that are becoming increasingly widespread in journalism within a networked new media environment. In the process, collaborative journalism not only blurs traditional categories of analysis, but raises a series of critical social questions about the relationship between economy, society and journalism, to the extent it is possible to discern that notions of authority and credibility are in flux, with certain longstanding reportorial principles seeming tired, if not anachronistic, since in the last few years, numerous journalists have appeared on the web whose collaborative work straddles the line between professional and non-professional journalism and whose positions bridge multiple institutions. However, there is also no reason to believe that industrialized and institutionalized communication will be entirely superseded by new communication technologies. Perhaps, a more probable situation is that the Internet will itself become another site for institutionalized communication. Although websites in India no longer rely on NRI (Non-resident Indian) traffic and a large number of news-sites are now substantial profit-making ventures but still there are several issues that the emerging collaborative culture has to confront. The journalists and news-mediacollaborators in India need to tackle not only the

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increasing institutionalization of the collaborative space and practices under the influence of global capital, but they also need to mull over the more elementary problems, like the paucity of online information in native languages, shady political intervention, and not to mention, infrastructural inadequacy in rural areas. It can not be denied that predominantly, information-rich elite has access to enormous quantities of information as well as to the capability of actively sharing ideas and information on the Internet. The information poor, on the other hand, remain passive and dependent and tend to draw on only from the hegemonic mainstream communication system, namely, the (mass) products of the culture industry (Louw, 2001, p.66). They remain either virtually excluded from the global communication system, as is the case with most rural Indians or only have access as passive recipients to mass-produced messages in the form of free-to-air, state owned television or radio channels like Doordarshan and All India Radio. Nonetheless, much can be gained from considering the relative strengths and limitations of collaborative journalism especially its implication in the emergence of new socio-economic formation. Do the new collaborative media technologies necessarily create new spaces for communicative dialogue or debate? If it does then what is the nature of those spaces; for instance, is the notion of a new private sphere a more feasible proposition than a new public sphere? What possibilities can be discerned for opposing the established discourses of global network capitalism with nonmarket production? In what way, journalism and news media is constituted as a socio-technical network and how should we interpret the modality of these networks and traditional institutions? Presumably, the struggle between the forces for discursive closure and emerging autonomy and open-endedness will remain an attribute of human existence amid emerging technology for the imminent future; but how these struggles of the future, play themselves out remains to be seen.

REFERENCES
Allan, S. (2006). Online news: Journalism and the Internet. Berkshire, UK: Open University Press. Audit Bureau of Circulations. (2006). NRS 2006: Key Findings [Press release]. Retrieved April 3, 2010 from http://www.auditbureau.org/nrs2006. htm Beaumont, C. (2008). Mumbai attacks: Twitter and Flickr used to break news. The Telegraph. Retrieved November 27, 2008 from http://www. telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/ 3530640/Mumbai-attacks-Twitter-and-Flickrused-to-break-news-Bombay-India.html Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Briggs, M. (2007). Journalism 2.0: How to survive and thrive. J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism & the Knight Citizen News Network. Bruns, A. (2008). Merinews: Citizen journalism in India. Snurblog. Retrieved March 27, 2008, from http://snurb.info/node/790 Burt, R. (2000). The network entrepreneur. In Swedberg, R. (Ed.), Entrepreneurship: The social science view (pp. 281307). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Chattopadhyay, S.(20092010). Online journalism: The changing media ecology from an Indian perspective. In Tunney, S., & Monaghan, G. (Eds.), Web journalism: A new form of ctizenship? (pp. 289305). Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic Press. Clark, S. (2001). Looking at the present: The current status of journalism on the Internet. Paper presented at 2001 Online Journalism Symposium, a project of the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Compton, J. R. (2010). Newspapers, labor and the flux of economic uncertainty. In Allan, S. (Ed.), The Routledge companion to news and journalism (pp. 591601). New York, NY: Routledge. Connell, T. (2008). Gannett acquires social media provider Ripple6. Press Release. Retrieved November 13, 2008, from http://www.gannett.com/ news/ pressrelease/2008/pr111308.htm Day, G. S., & Schoemaker, P. J. H. (2000). A different game. In Day, G. S., & Schoemaker, P. H. (Eds.), Wharton on managing new technologies (pp. 2239). NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Garnham, N. (1986). The media and the public sphere. In Golding, P., Murdock, G., & Schlesinger, P. (Eds.), Communicating politics: Mass communications and the political process. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press. Habermas, J. (1989). The public sphere: An encyclopedia article. In Bronner, S. E., & Kellner, D. M. (Eds.), Critical theory and society: A reader (pp. 136142). New York, NY & London, UK: Routledge. Howe, J. (2006). The rise of crowdsourcing. Wired Magazine, 14(6), 6976. Instablogs. (2010). Instablogs tour. Retrieved February 20, 2010, from http://www.instablogs. com/tour/ Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Law, J. (1994). Organizing modernity. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. Lawson-Borders, G. (2003). Integrating new media and old media: Seven observations of convergence as a strategy for best practices in media organizations. The International Journal on Media Management, 5(2), 93.

Louw, P. E., & Chitty, N. (2000). South Africas miracle cure: A stage-managed TV spectacular? In Malek, A., & Kavoori, A. P. (Eds.), The global dynamics of news coverage and news agendas. Stamford, CT: Ablex. Merinews.com. (2010). About us. Retrieved February 9, 2010, from http://www.merinews. com/aboutus.jsp Murdock, G., & Schlesinger, P. (Eds.). (1987). Communicating politics (pp. 4553). Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press. Noack, D. (1998). Crossfire: Print vs. online newsrooms. Editor & Publisher, 131, 3841. Paul, N. (2000). Integrating old and new media newsrooms. Cyberjournalist. Retrieved July 26, 2000, from http://www.cyberjournalist.net/ integrating-old-and-new-media-newsrooms/ Schudson, M. (2003). Click here for democracy: A history and critique of an information-based model of citizenship. In Jenkins, H., Thorburn, D., & Seawell, B. (Eds.), Democracy and new media (pp. 4960). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Turner, F. (2005). Actor-networking the news. Social Epistemology, 19(4), 321324. doi:10.1080/02691720500145407 Zollman, P. (2000). The key question: Integration or independence. Online Technology. Retrieved April 19, 2009, from http://www.newsandtech. com/issues/ 2000/04-00/ot/04-00_zollman.htm

ADDITIONAL READING
Bruns, A. (2005). Gatewatching: Collaborative online news production. New York: P. Lang. Fenton, N. (2001). New Media, old news: Journalism and democracy in the digital age. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Greenspan, A. (2004). India and the IT Revolution: Networks of global culture. London: Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9780230510371 Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture. London: New York University Press. McLuhan, M. (1995). Understanding media. London: Routledge. (Original work published 1964) Poster, M. (2006). Information Please: Culture and politics in the age of digital machines. London: Duke University Press. Rossiter, N. (2006). Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions. Rotterdam: NAI. Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. London: Penguin. Staiger, J., & Sabine, H. (2009). Convergence, media, history. New York: Routledge. Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. D. (2006). Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything. New York: Penguin. Terranova, T. (2004). Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS

Actor-Network Theory (ANT): Actor-Network theorys methodology involves scientific

realism, social constructivism, and discourse analysis in its central concept of hybrids that are simultaneously real, social, and discursive. Developed as an analysis of scientific and technological artifacts, ANTs theoretical distinctiveness derives from its refusal to reduce explanations to either natural, social, or discursive categories while recognizing the significance of each. The modern constitution or world view uses one dimensional language operating in the framework of opposite poles of nature and culture. Knowledge and artifacts are explained either by society (social constructionisms) or by nature (realism). In order to transcend this dualism a second dimension is needed. Through Actor-Network theory, it is possible to understand the simultaneous construction of culture, society and nature. Citizen Journalism: Citizen Journalism refers to the practice of reporting news events by members of the public without professional training in journalism or affiliation to established news media. That information can take many forms, from blogs, contribution in citizen journalism sections of news media to podcast or webcast. It can include text, pictures, audio and video. Public Sphere: The public sphere is the arena within which debate occurs; it is the generation of ideas, shared knowledge and the construction of opinion that occurs when people assemble and discuss. According to Habermas, it is a network for communicating information and points of view. The public sphere is where ideas and information are shared. Media theorists have used Habermas public sphere to explain the importance of communication for the processes of democracy. For Habermas, the public sphere was most constructive when not influenced by commercial interests or state control.

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