This week Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine writes in his regular Guardian column about how networked journalism may be a future way for journalists to be working. Jarvis defines networked journalism as “collaboration with the communities it covers”. Although I can easily see how this approach secures a stakeholder buy in, I would worry that objective and unbiased news (as if such a thing ever exisited) will be very hard to aspire to. News readers have of course always been one of the main sources of revenue for newspapers (advertising being the other one), but going too far down this route could create serious conflics of interest.
On the other hand, one could argue that networked journlists have already existed for decades where political correspondents rely on politicians to share information with them.