jonathan Krim of WashingtonPost.com is leading a panel. On it are: The Dan (Gillmor), Mark Tapscott of The Washington Examiner, Bill Allison of The Sunlight Foundation.

Dan begins by saying that some types of stories, particularly ones that can be broken into small pieces, lend themselves to distributed journalism. He points to a story done by Talking Points Memo and to the possibility of opening up the WSJ’s current series on options back-dating. [From the chat, Jerry Michalski points to a Chicago crime map mashup. Steve Crandall points to a map of Iraqi casualties by US geography.]

Bill talks about citizen investigations of House corruption.

Mark says he’s “Dan Gillmor’s bastard child.” He read We the Media and was struck by Dan saying “My readers know more than I do.” At the Washington Examiner, he suggested making readers part of the staff. They set up the Washington Examiner Community Action

Jonathan asks whether distributed journalism undermines the notion that journalism is a craft. Does it undermine professionalism? Does it have a negative impact, in addition to the positive impacts?

Mark says that that’s the big question. “I call them collaborative networks rather than distributed.” “Distributed” has a whiff that it’s distributed from on high, he says. Bill says that it results in better journalism. Dan says that if more institutions used these techniques, it would make them more credible. Dan says he thinks it’ll be good for journalism, although it may not be good for the traditional institutions of journalism.

Q: (Steve Crocker): This is exciting. What’s the reaction going to be?
A: (Jonathan) The sea change will be tremendous at the corporate level, if these changes evolve as we hope.

A: (Dan). Privacy is likely to be the lever by which government shuts down access to data.

Q: Journalism has received the most friendly of challenges, compared to what we’ve said about other gatekeepers such as the telcos. at DailyKos, there’s some media bashing, but more often people will point to stories, or complain that journalists haven’t lived up to journalistic standards.

Q: (Yochai Benkler) What you’re experiencing is not unusual. College teachers worry about their kids reading Wikipedia. Many companies have been worried about using open source software. All sorts of authorities are worried. The mainstream media itself contributes to the undermining of science by treating everything as 50-50. There’s pushback now on this.

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