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What Vocalo plans to do is develop, slowly, as a quasi-online community. A number of the Internet’s biggest success stories, including such citizen-journalism sites as Talking Points Memo and Firedoglake, started modestly as blogs and evolved to the point where they were doing actual journalism. The former started as the Web side project of an established if not especially prominent political journalist named Josh Marshall and has since taken on employees and spearheaded investigations into the U.S. Attorney scandal. The latter began as a place for a Hollywood producer and a West Virginia lawyer to obsess about the Valerie Plame affair and has since become a go-to site for up-to-the-minute live blogging of the Scooter Libby trial and various hearings.
This, it’s clearer to me now, is what Vocalo wants to do. Rightly or not, however, it’s much harder for established media organizations to grow a project quietly from an experiment into a full-fledged source of content. The early, bad Pitchfork didn’t get buried by criticism because it was just some dude’s thing, so no one cared if it sucked because no one expected it not to. Chicago Public Radio can’t do that, or at least people like me haven’t allowed them to. It’s at least worth asking whether they should be given the same right to suck as everyone else.
