In a Forbes.com piece today, Citizens Media Entrepreneurs, columnist Sam Whitmore says "America's pathetic literacy rate" will doom most citizen journalism sites that don't emphasize audio and video over text.
He writes:
The successful citizens media sites will mimic Ourmedia.org, a portal which offers "free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches." Notice that "text" was listed fourth--behind videos, audio files and photos....
While I agree that citizen journalism sites should go beyond text, I think Whitmore is shortchanging what readers will tolerate. On sites such as BeniciaNews.com, where text submissions are more common than photos and where audio and video uploads are not yet possible, we've seen strong traffic based almost solely on written words. (BeniciaNews is run by GetLocalNews.com, my employer and one of the companies Whitmore mentions in his piece.)
Readers will overlook grammatical and spelling errors if they care about the topic and the author has something interesting to say. (Longwindedness, however, can be deathly.)
Also, consider (a) how much easier it is to post text than video, audio or photos and (b) how equally bad audio or visual media can be.
Whitmore say, "The generations behind us would rather watch and listen than read."
True. But the generations ahead of us would rather participate than "watch and listen" and text is critical to making that happen.
Bottom line: Incorporate all media, but don't underestimate the value of text as a means of making the user part of the conversation.
Side note: Whitmore uses "citizens media" not "citizen journalism." See discussion here.
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