• by Tom Hespos , March 21, 2006

Last week, my girlfriend Lauren and I took some time away from the freezing New York weather and spent some time in the Florida sunshine. It was one of those vacations where we made very few plans, hoping to do a lot of nothing at all. We spent a good deal of time with my father, who'd retired and moved down south a couple of years ago. Aside from seeing him, we really didn't plan to do much, and we hoped that we could avoid excitement and stress for a bit.

We weren't entirely successful, unfortunately. Lauren got some bad news from home just a few days into the trip. A family friend was killed in an accident, and a number of emotionally-charged phone calls immediately followed as the sad news spread through her family and circle of friends. I hadn't met the man who died, and I was hoping to find some information online about him, as I would be accompanying Lauren to his funeral upon our return to New York. I was surprised and disappointed to find nothing other than a four-line Associated Press story about the accident that killed him.

The mainstream media really wasn't much help to me while I was vacationing. Since I wasn't running around like my usual crazy self, I began to really notice the mainstream media's shortcomings. As a former journalism major and newspaper editor, I found myself asking why there were no stories covering some of the things I noticed. For instance, a mysterious algae bloom had taken over the lake behind my father's place. My dad said the same algae typically shows up at the end of the summer, but for some unexplained reason, it was months early this year. At one point, we saw people spraying chemicals into the lake to kill the algae, but I noticed that many of the people in the community had no idea what was going on. No one seemed to know what the algae was, who the people were who were spraying it, why it was here early this year, or what caused it. You'd think something like that would be covered by the local paper or on the local news. We didn't hear anything and couldn't find anything.

Same goes for a big car accident that closed down a portion of the main thoroughfare in town for a time. And a construction project in the middle of town--no one seemed to know what's being built there.

These things made me think of my newspaper days --about how we would make judgments about which stories to run and which to bump or cut. The number of ad pages would dictate how much editorial we would be able to run. Of course, the newspaper had to be an even number of pages. We had both business and space constraints on what was considered newsworthy and what wasn't. Sometimes, you would have to cut the story on what the Garden Club was doing because a major story came up close to deadline.

With linear media, that will always be the case. Newspapers will always have a column-inch limit on what they can run, ad-edit ratios to adhere to and a limited number of news reporters. Radio and television broadcasts will always be limited to short sound bites, 30-minute newscasts and commercial pods of a certain length.

Of course, these constraints don't exist in non-linear media--the content that everyday people can create and distribute. A podcast can be any length. So can a blog post. One doesn't need to cut three-and-a-half minutes of film down to 15 seconds in a video log, or crop a huge color photograph so it can be printed at a smaller size on the front page of a newspaper.

The constraints are gone. And the learning curve is simply not as steep as it once was. The publishing playing field has been leveled out for us.

But one of the most interesting factors driving the citizen publishing movement is that there is plenty to cover. The mainstream media miss a lot of things. There are plenty of stories that don't have the mass appeal to draw readership in the city newspaper, but that would appeal to a large number of people online.

Perhaps that is one of the major drivers behind citizen-publishing--that it fills an informational void left by the mainstream media. I see this in action almost every day with the part-time blogging I do. I often get notes of thanks from people who read things on my blog that they hadn't read about anywhere else.

Maybe one day each of us will have ready access to some sort of publishing forum that has the potential to reach as many people as are interested in the subject matter of the pieces we publish. Each one of us could be a journalist to one extent or another.