On cultural differences, tits and participatory journalism

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Apropos of the Janet Jackson affair -- which quickly passed my radar and was instantly moved to disposable memory with the label "typical American 100% violence/0% nudity tolerance imbalance" -- Adrian Holovaty has an interesting take on participatory journalism:

Well, we all know what happened during that performance. And I saw it -- live. Er, I thought I saw it. I wasn't sure. The camera cut away so quickly that I couldn't really tell what'd happened.

So I did what any self-respecting Internet-junkie would do: I flipped open my laptop and hit the Web.

CNN had nothing. MSNBC had nothing. Neither did the New York Times, Washington Post or Chicago Tribune. Google News didn't say anything about it, either. I checked a bunch of other big-media sites but couldn't find any coverage.

He found the story breaking at Fark:

Read the archived comment thread to see the story unfold. There were first-person accounts of watching the event. There was background information. There was analysis and piecing-together of the facts. And, most importantly, there was an effort to distribute any and all raw information about the incident, mostly in the form of high-resolution TV-screen-grabs and video.

It was clear that all of this was fueled by a desire to get to the bottom of the story -- a desire not unlike that of a professional reporter.

Could this have been a glimpse of the future? Could a much more traditional news story be covered in the same way, given the right mix of a dedicated audience and enabling technology?

A refreshing view and interesting questions, from a journalist, compared to the usual reactions of ignorance, doubt or contempt that many journalists display to micro-publications on the Internet.

Meanwhile, in the country which goes for all the violence but no nudity, Matt Haughey writes that he'd like to someday live in a country where a quick nipple shown on TV isn't the end of civilization. Well Matt, Damelon Kimbrough suggests a place (warning: link is not work-safe). A very nice place, I concur.