Photo credit Scott Beale

Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson are an example of the new media- independent, grassroots reporters and news. The couple runs Ryan is Hungry, a videoblog that interviews and features green gurus, tips, and information. They look for “stories that don’t get covered in the mainstream media worlds of television and newspapers,” and they bring that news to us.

Their medium, video, is powerful and far reaching, and the Internet, limitless. Their message is environmental and technological activism. From a quick browse through the site, I learned about an ecological shipping container hotel, clothing swaps, permaculture gardens, and underground supper clubs. This video blog is delivering culture! That’s the new media.

Ryanne and Jay also run Node 101 an open source video blogging (vlogging) collaborative project, for teaching and spreading the technology worldwide. In their words, “the goal of Node 101 is to teach media literacy as a life skill and to change the current media landscape from being a lecture to being a conversation.”

Resources such as Node 101 make vlogging and blogging easy and have opened the “the conversation” to virtually everyone. You no longer need technical expertise to run your own blog or even vlog site; just a computer, a digital camera, and some motivation. I started my blog in, literally, five minutes and instantly I was a published author. A few weeks later, I joined Green Options, a group blogging site. If you are writing or videoing beyond a personal diary, and sharing on the Internet, you are the new media.

Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, PBS, and BBC no longer decide what is newsworthy. We do, and the networks are scrambling to keep up. The Washington Post featured a series of articles about how the spread of cell phones with cameras and other digital technology are making journalists out of average citizens worldwide. Their site (as do most on-line news sites) even features citizen bloggers in addition to staff reporters.

The field is open to those who want to play. The traditional media is looking for writers to cover events as serious as the presidential primaries. Public relations firms seek coverage for their projects. Opportunity for sharing what is news to you abounds. Site aggregators such as Hugg, Digg, and Stumble offer additional exposure to the self-published. I had a post end up on FARK and it received over 4,000 views in two days. It is that easy.

Sure, a blog post is not always the same as a news story, but it is the way we are communicating. It is raising media awareness and changing the ways we exchange ideas and information. We are learning from each other and our ideas are spreading like wildfire. Governments can’t contain our enthusiasm and the balance of control is shifting. Follow Jay and Ryanne’s lead: be the media. They’ll even teach us how.