Urban Vancouver

Ruth Ozeki and Sheila Baxter Both at the Library, But I Can't Make Either (And Other Thoughts on Citizen Journalism)

By Richard Eriksson on May 7, 2007 - 1:48pm

Because I had promised to play floorball tonight, I'm missing out on two interesting literary events, both happening at the Vancouver Public Library:

• Rose Ozeki reading from her book, My Year In Meats, which is part of this year's One Book, One Vancouver (our special report)
• via Beyond Robson, I find out that Sheila Baxter will read from her play, Death in a Dumpster: A Passion Play for the Homeless.

One way I'm hoping to grow and promote Urban Vancouver is to 'assign' readers to go out and cover events that I won't be able to attend. NowPublic (I work in an office shared with them) fulfills some of that promise, but it hasn't been obvious to me how I ask for coverage of events I'm unable to attend. Maybe one day I'll walk ten steps over and ask directly how I do it, but I'd love to know if anybody reading this will be covering either event and would like to document it, with audio, video, photos and notes. If you post to your blog about it, I'd love to hear about it, either as a cross-post or a link in the comments.

Asking "hey, is anybody out there covering this" is not my understanding of what a traditional 'managing editor' does, but that's the idea of citizen journalism: anybody can document anything, but I don't believe you can just assume that someone will take the time to post it to a website. There needs to be a little bit of incentive, money not being the only thing that motivates people. Attention and the feeling of being part of a conversation are often sufficient. This is a discussion worth at least a few books, but I am thinking of what it traditionally means to be an 'editor' and what alternatives are out there.