Mutualisation of News through an Engaging Media is a Safer Bet in the Age of Sustainability and Diminishing Advertising Revenue

“Gone are the days of “us and them” journalism”, suggests that there is no longer any different between the audience and the journalists with the increasing level of normal people becoming “citizen journalists”. The use of new and digital media has given the audiences the power to produce their own media product and level up with the journalists, according to Editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, now our journalists and readers as equal partners.” - Yusra Khalid ( Independent Blogger) In 2010, the former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, showed the world about the power of publicness through his Twitter posting revolting against the court injection on The Guardian to report on the dumping of toxic chemicals by the company, Trafigura. Trafigura became viral in Twitter; the result is more vigorous news stories and personal comments that could have possibly escaped from the newspaper pages. Calling this as ‘mutualisation of news’, Rusbridger underlined the collaboration of professionals and nonprofessionals in the dissemination of news. From a carefully filtered and controlled letters to editor, the role of readers or news consumers have traversed such distance that news are now produced by a collaborative effort. The Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ is a typical example of how the laymen or those having a journalistic flair or at least an opinion work together to build an interactive or collaborative news platform, a completely different experience social media platforms provide. Alan Rusbridger comments “The mutualisation of news is a very powerful idea that particularly works for the Guardian, as our relationship with our readers is very strong. We can use the community of our readers in ways we would not have been able to in the past.” Rusbridger says that in order to make the members feel involved and more interested, the Guardian should build trust by behaving like the old-style mutual building societies. The web has led to a news community where ideas and news are shared rather than delivered, as new and digital media has become more accessible through the use of the Internet world wide. He also suggests that, “By continuing to go down this route, we will be more diverse and genuinely more plural than other media organizations and create a huge external resource. We need to continue breaking down the perceptions of a remote journalist who is a preacher, living distantly, and newspapers as being in bed with power and on the side of power, rather than the reader.”