Peer Review in the Alternative Media

In the current environment, the alternative media is more so each day, stepping onto the stage of professional journalism. This brings with it significant challenges that we must grapple with and new opportunities. The Internet has expanded the alternative media’s reach and made this push into professional journalism possible, yet the content can vary significantly in quality.

Imagine the alternative media as a newspaper and you will see immediately the problem facing it. The alternative media has no local coverage, no reporters, no editors, and no way to fix the problem. All we have are writers, YouTube/radio hosts and a few scattered conspiracy publications, and some well-known voices in the so-called community.

Now I can’t begin to solve all of these problems alone, but I can certainly make a start, and that’s what I’ve done in establishing a new @Minds group called The Peer Review [link first in the comments section]. This group can at least solve the problem of finding editors, especially when one’s roommate, friend, sibling, or even parent who may usually edit your work is busy. The plan is simple, you post your draft for an article (Google Docs is a good choice for this), whether for publication on @Minds or otherwise, and people can use the comments section or Google Docs to help guide you to areas that need correction for style, grammar or general flow, thus allowing you to get quick feedback on your work. You can then vote up the people who have helped you, or even send them points for their work, thus allowing them to boost their articles faster, after they’ve had it edited of course, thus helping to better the whole community.

Now, if only we could get people to go down to city halls and start looking into local corruption and writing articles about it, we’d be like a real newspaper or something.