MAINSTREAM MEDIA VS. CITIZEN JOURNALISTS
Digital Journal — Chances are that unless your professional life is immersed in online media, you might not have noticed all the chatter going on about “citizen journalism.”
It involves readers shifting from consumer to contributor by providing news to major outlets. Global news sites like MSNBC or BBC invite readers to submit photos, video and stories. The Los Angeles Times even briefly experimented with online “wikitorials” — newspaper editorials written by anyone — although they were quickly suspended after being flooded with comment spam.
In his book We The Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, technology columnist Dan Gillmor ties the idea of fly-on-the-wall reportage into several recent tech trends: the open-source code movement that produced Linux; the read/write Web technology that ushered in blogs and wikis; and peer-to-peer networks such as LimeWire and Kazaa. Also worth noting are palm-sized video recorders, mobile text messaging and camera phones — the latter of which saw their defining moment in citizen journalism during the aftermath of the London subway bombings. Newspapers published grainy shots from camera phone users stuck in the Underground, blurring the line between witness and reporter.
But there’s more to it than technology. Part of this paradigm is thinking of news as an ongoing conversation between producer and consumer, not news written on stone tablets to be blankly read by the obedient masses.
Here’s what Gillmor thinks about the audience becoming part of the process and how it will impact journalists:
Our core values, including accuracy and fairness, will remain important, and we’ll still be gatekeepers in some ways, but our ability to shape larger conversations —and to provide context — will be at least as important as our ability to gather facts and report them.
South Korea’s OhmyNews works with 35 to 40 professional journalists and close to 33,000 freelancers from South Korea and around the world. The five-year-old service is a political force in South Korean society, helping elect reformist president
Roh Moo-hyun in 2003 by providing a media voice to those who wanted change.
There are dozens of other such initiatives: Newspapers in Colorado, Texas and South Carolina publish print editions of citizen-submitted journalism, with material ranging from sports coverage to photo spreads; Wikinews, a spinoff from the non-profit that manages the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, invites writers to contribute daily content; and Gillmor quit his job with the San Jose Mercury News last November to start up a media blog/news site called Bayosphere.
This trend could mean mainstream media is in trouble. While still dominant, network newscast viewership and daily newspaper circulation in North America have been in chronic decline. Some players in the blog world — which, at its best, could be considered a type of citizen journalism — can’t wait for mainstream media to die. And to that I say, “Be careful what you wish for.”
For one thing, citizen journalism (and blogging in particular) reminds me of student journalism. People at my university paper didn’t want to come in and start as reporters. They thought they should write columns because they had lots of interesting things to say. Not many people wanted to do the tedious work of sitting through council meetings or interviewing administrators.
So it goes for blogs, which broadcast deep thoughts direct to a waiting world. But do these diary-like entries really help the rest of us know more about the world? I think we need more reportage and less ranting.
Gillmor wrote that he assumed his readers knew more than he did. Keep in mind Gillmor was a tech columnist in Silicon Valley, so he might have had a rarified readership. I’ve covered beats like health, the environment and criminal justice over my career. The experts in those fields certainly knew more than me, but the citizens I was writing for sure didn’t. Why would they? I spent 50 hours a week or more immersed in those worlds, extracting important and interesting tidbits and passing them along to the public. That’s what journalists should do: Take from the info-rich and give to the info-poor, so we all have a reasonable picture of what’s going on in our society.
To be interested in journalism’s end goal means to have some curiosity about the wider world. But some of the citizen “journalism” I’ve seen makes me both gag and wonder about that fundamental curiosity. Most of these info-products contain filler like recipes, cute photo contests and self-promoting “news stories” by local businesses. Big deal.
While there’s much to be said for a community sharing a really great recipe for Tuna Casserole Surprise, there has to be more to its collective conversation if the citizenry wants to be a healthy, functioning democracy. If people have no concerted curiosity, there’s a problem. And if people gravitate to inane fluff and give the weightier material a pass, then the citizen journalism bubble should soon burst.
One academic told me perhaps we might see “small-j” and “big-J” journalism, where citizens cover easy stories and the pros tackle investigative pieces. Actually, if we could go one step further and empower citizens to dive into the heavier stuff too, so much the better.
If this sounds like a bitter tirade, it’s because I’m frustrated by the gap between promise and practice. I like the idea of news as conversation. I have no problem with citizens joining the J-party. But it will only be worthwhile if the outcome is a better informed citizenry — and not just when it comes to the perfect Tuna Casserole Surprise.
This article is part of Digital Journal’s national magazine edition. Pick up your copy of Digital Journal in bookstores across Canada and the United States. Or subscribe to Digital Journal now, and receive 8 issues for $29.95 + GST ($48.95 USD).
