Op-Ed: Citizen Journalism? They don’t even know what it is

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Let’s start with a few delicate hints for the vocabulary-impaired.

Citizen: member of a wider community.

Journalist: Person who makes regular contributions to a publication.

Not citizen as in "legal resident of a particular nation", you pedantic, illiterate, context-free cretins.

Citizen like in the world. You remember the world, big blue thing, full of sewage? Yeah, that’s the one.

Not journalist in the sense of some damn 1940s movie, you pitiful, obsolete, regressive, verbose, sheep.

Journalist as in someone who actually does something.

It doesn't mean "blog". Blog means a piece on any subject, where content is largely subjective.

Yeah, “subjective”. It’s a word.

It’s also a “context”, so no wonder it’s so hard for some to understand. “Context” involves thinking of words in relation to a subject.

Then we come to that strange concept, “content”. Content doesn’t mean contented like a cow, sorry about that. It means content, as the substance of which a thing is comprised.

Wow, we’re nearly getting polysyllabic, already. And all I had to do was write a definition of terms like the index to a piece of legislation. Communications revolution, eh? All those media colleges are really paying off.

Crayola must be thrilled.

So, having more or less established there is such a thing as a citizen journalist, we now attempt to convey in the vernacular that message o the sage and delightful media in the sort of rhetorical form they’ve been inflicting on the public for the last 20 years.

We’ll start with one of those mindless questions:

Gosh, if’n they be citizen journalist-varmints, whatever do these-they-there weird and exotic critters do, Billy Bob Sleazebutt?

Waal, Beulah May Sleazebutt, they’s done beed wrote they article-things, ‘bout stuff what happens, but they does it themselves.

(Pause for medication, respiration, burial where required.)

Citizen journalism was a gut level response across the world to the lack of actual information being generated by mainstream.

Oh, yeah, “information”. What news is supposed to be about. Being four syllables it wasn’t in the intro. I didn’t want to kill anyone.

Information is sometimes seen as something other than a series of close-ups of some agent’s pet, or some useless celebrity. Sometimes it even involves pictures of places and things happening. God knows why.

Citizen journalism is also an attempt to convey news in a holistic sense. More than one source.

More than some dismal, edited by search engine, crudfest.
More than SEO crap.
More than tabloid politics.
More than journalistic incumbencies in the unelected media.

One of the reasons mainstream news is such a total loss on the net is that people can go and get their own information. The whole idea of Old Media news reporting only retains any sort of credibility because of the very few people who provide actual information.

Hence the mass movement to the net, and the rise of Citizen Journalism.

However, analyses of even the idea of Citizen Journalism are still stuck in 2000 somewhere.

Here’s a case in point: Journalism Co UK: This is an article called “Citizen journalism start ups are doomed.”


Read this piece, and be awed by the 15,500 members encased therein.

See any comprehension of the idea of Citizen Journalism? Or do you see a very mainstream perspective, colored by “I got bitten by my own startup site”?

Here we have The Guardian on the subject of The Rules Of Citizen Journalism, which is a nice way of saying they assume that citizen journalism can skip the rules of basic journalism. This relates to an article about Obama written by someone called Fowler:

Traditional journalists learn or hear things all the time that, under the rules of journalism, they can't use, because they heard or learned them in an off-the-record context. A journalist invited into a closed fundraiser - this doesn't happen often, but does from time to time - will be told by aides very clearly that everything is off the record and will presumably abide by that. So if a New York Times or San Francisco Chronicle or Guardian journalist had been inside that event under the terms I describe, the remark in all likelihood would never have become public.

Ah, but Fowler is a citizen! And as a citizen, she did something that no reporting journalist would do - she donated money to Obama's campaign

Again, a misconception. Even journalists are people… well, some of them. Information is information. Whether it’s used or not isn’t quite as clear cut as that. If someone says they’re off the record, the assumption that statement, or at least its content, won’t be parceled up as a third party comment, and published anyway is just naïve.

Maybe they read it somewhere.

We have here, from Web Pro News, the interesting if perhaps slightly horrifying news that CBS is launching a Citizen Journalism

Web site where users can upload video and images of news events from their mobile phones.

Yep, no bandwagon here, just a major news medium who likes people with mobile phones, and want to help them.

Then from Editor and Publisher there’s The Examiner, a contract freelancer who works like a Guide on About.com, specializing in a subject. See, nothing will quench the originality of mainstream media, particularly when it’s so much cheaper than hiring traditional journalists, some of whom even live in buildings.

Citizen journalism has taken on the characteristics of journalism, complete with the vast range of views, because traditional journalism is no longer capable of doing its job.

It’s too slow. There’s not enough information. Any reader can now find more information in the time it takes to read an article. What’s written has to serve some purpose, not just parrot AP. If I want to read AP, I’ll read AP. If I want information, I’d prefer it to be in one place and not have to dredge the entire net trying to find it.

I was working on a political news site one day, and got an email from my publisher: Congratulations, we’ve just been named as a source by the Wall Street Journal. That was for a piece I did on Petro China, their big oil company.

See any possible ramifications to that email? Even WSJ is looking for information, (quite rightly, waiting for normal sources is pretty dumb) and guess where they’re looking.

Journalists can’t function properly in mainstream any more, and the Rube Goldberg editorial hierarchies and policies are just absurd.

Oh, yeah, nearly forgot.

There’s a site called Digital Journal.com, where people actually contribute information, not just links. In the preceding 1158 words I didn’t want to mention that because I thought it might scare someone, and they’d have to go and read Cosmopolitan to recover.

I have my ethical moments.

If you want a real laugh, search Citizen+Journalism.