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Blogs and Citizen Journalism: The Effect on Our Culture
by Laura Riggio
Web 2.0, the second generation of web communities that encourage user participation, has changed our lives dramatically. It has made our world smaller by connecting people with the same interests and it has made our possibilities endless with the amount of information available. It has also made our lives easier than we could have ever imagined by saving us time and money. Why pay $250 for a subscription to The New York Times when it could be emailed to your inbox for free? Why pay for a classified ad in a newspaper when there’s Craigslist? And why buy a CD when you can download it faster and cheaper on iTunes? The point is, the web is changing our culture. It is making our lives easier, faster, and cheaper. And while the web is definitely saving us something, whether it be time, money, or confusion, what are we paying for in the end?
This question becomes particularly important when it comes to the news media. News has been gravitating online and blogs have enabled more selection, opinion, links, and user commentary--leaving print journalism and the news“paper” in the dust. The loss of a traditional newspaper to online media, blogs and citizen journalism is making us lose more than just paper and ink. It is making us lose a tradition of long form writing, prose that has been nurtured and perfected, real shoe-leather reporting that takes time and for those nostalgists, the thing we read while drinking coffee and eating breakfast. The web is costing us something and it might be traditions and values rooted in our culture.
BLOGS AND CITIZEN JOURNALISTS: THE DEBATE
The whole idea behind citizen journalism is that anyone can be a journalist—it doesn’t have to be left to the professionals. The ability to blog allows access to a medium that was traditionally dominated by big business and the elite few. Blogging's low barrier to entry, meaning that anyone can start a blog in a matter of minutes without cost, is appealing. Blogging gives the amateur a chance to voice his or her opinions, ideas, and thoughts without an editor. And now blogging has turned into something else, something that can even make a profit, with the help of a few banner ads and links from Google.
Today, blogs are more popular than ever and some blogs are considered news sources to many people who get their news on the internet.
A PEW Internet study in 2006 found that 73 percent of all internet users get their news from the internet. Eight percent of internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog and 39 percent or about 57 million American adults read blogs. Whether reading or writing, blogs are part of American life and this is only increasing.
NYU Professor Jay Rosen writes in his blog PressThink that "the people formally known as the audience" are taking a permanent seat in the changing world of journalism and we need to focus on that.
In some ways, citizen journalism can make traditional journalism stronger. There is the idea of power in numbers, which was shown in the Rathergate scandal, when within hours of PBS posting the documents Dan Rather used on 60 minutes to suggest President Bush got special treatment in the Texas Air National Guard, bloggers called into question whether the documents were forgeries. The idea here is that no one knows everything but everyone knows something. This can be particularly useful, especially with fact-checking.
Sometimes, citizen journalists are even able to give us something traditional journalists just can’t because of money and time constraints. During the tsunami in 2004, bloggers were able to give better accounts than some news outlets because they were on the scene and could offer photos, videos, and first-person accounts. Bloggers quickly became the source of information for some news outlets as well as the public.
The value of citizen journalism also lies in the fact that they can cater to niche markets that the mainstream media just can’t, whether it’s because of money or because of staff. People will be able to get the news that they want regardless if the mainstream media covers it.
Even though citizen journalism can be effective,there is the looming question of how to distinguish between the work of an expert and the work of an amateur. There are blogs that have risen to the top and become reputable. Arianna Huffington launched her blog The Huffington Post in 2005 and now has one of the most widely read liberal blogs on the web. She was even named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in 2006. Her website is only growing bigger and more reputable and she even told Time that she wanted to add more video and investigative pieces to the site.
But even if bloggers haven’t been so reputable and gotten some stories wrong, they--like the mainstream media--have been able to redeem themselves. Matt Drudge's Drudge Report, has made countless mistakes, claiming in the past that Sen. John Kerry had an affair with an intern or recently writing a false headline about Sen. Hilary Clinton and her health plan. Yet his website is stil checked for updates by everyone on capitol hill on an hourly basis.
EFFECTS ON CULTURE
The reality is, as Jack Shafer writes on Slate, newspapers have been dying for eighty years and news organizations must make the shift to become multi-platform. Columnist Mark Morford, of SF Gate wrote that newspapers are making a shift. “They are merely shifting, peeling back, juggling approaches and reorganizing ideas, all in order to be reborn, In order to adapt. In order to compete and breathe and thrive and become the new-thing.”
But with this shift and rebirth, will come a transformation in writing and traditional journalistic values. Short prose that the reader can scan is preferred online. With blogging, short posts, written several times a day and filled with opinion is the norm (excluding, Rosen's PressThink, which goes against the grain by featuring a longer form). It’s not preferred to read something long form on a computer screen--at least until eINK, a company that produces flexible e-paper, has come up with something worthwhile.
And its not just Strunk and White's values that will disappear. Bloggers and citizen journalists aren’t held to the same standards as professional journalists are. In In Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, he writes that bloggers aren’t held accountable for their work. They don’t go to jail to protect a source and they are rarely sued or prosecuted because the government and corporations don’t seem to care what they write.
The Dean of Columbia University and skeptic of citizen journalism, Nicholas Lemann wrote an article for The New Yorker a year ago titled “Amateur Hour: Journalism without Journalists,” saying that he doesn’t feel blogs rise to the level of a “journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the old media—to function as a replacement rather than an addendum.
Keen explains in his book that “this blurring of lines between the audience and the author, between fact and fiction, between invention and reality further obscures objectivity. The cult of the amateur has made it increasingly difficult to determine the difference between reader and writer, between artist and spin doctor…between amateur and expert.”
The result? Keen writes, the decline in quality and reliability of information we receive. The web will make a different form of journalism the norm, not because it's trying to, but because it is easier, faster, and cheaper. Short writing takes less time to read and opinion is easier than objective reporting to write. Readers will come to expect a different quality in their news. A quality in which the writer might not stand up for his/her work, in which sources are not valued, and in which they might not have gone to great lengths to produce accurate and reliable information.
If our traditional form of journalism is not preserved, will the former ethics and values simply disappear? Will journalism become sloppy and lazy in order to conform to our fast and easy lifestyle and most importantly, what kind of effect will this have on our society?
Perspective is reality and if our perspective changes, how can traditions and values be preserved. Hal Crowther, columnist of The Independent weekly (North Carolina) writes that “while the newspaper is expendable, the tradition it represents and the information it supplies are not…if professional journalism vanishes along with the newspapers, this thing we call a constitutional democracy becomes a banana republic.”
SOLUTIONS
So what is the solution to all this? There may not be one and it just might take time to see where everything is going.
Rosen wrote on PressThink that “the question now isn’t whether blogs can be journalism. They can be, sometimes. It isn’t whether bloggers ‘are’ journalists. They apparently are, sometimes….They’re even capable at times, and perhaps only in special circumstances, of beating Big journalism at its own game.” He suggests pro-am (professional-amateur journalism)as a solution and has his own project, Newassignment.net, does just that.
Rosen explained on his blog that the site uses open source methods to develop assignments that could be completed by both professional journalists, who set high standards for the work, as well as people who donate to works they like and see are advancing. Most "donators" would be people who are interested in the news. They would also want to contribute because Newassignment.net would do journalism that the mainstream media doesn't do.
Newassignment.net said on its website that its mission is to "spark innovation in 'open platform' journalism, distributed reporting and what’s now called crowd sourcing...We think the hybrid forms—mixing professional journalists and amateur contributors—are going to be the strongest forms, and we’re attempting to show they have potential."
One of their first assignments, called Assignment Zero was with Wired and upon completion it was termed, a "a highly satisfying failure." Rosen wrote that they ran into organizational and inspirational problems as well as how to assign people tasks. He noted that just because contributers signed up, doesn't mean they will participate..."You still have to convince them that participating is a good option, that it won’t waste their time, that they will know what to do, or be able to figure it out."
Rosen also wrote that the project was well worth it and that, "At the end I felt I had the challenge more squarely in my sights and I am not nearly so clueless now."
What can be learned with Rosen's project is that there is still a need for professional journalism--for many reasons, down to the most obvious: a simple interest in doing it.
Although the web is growing at a fast pace, there may be time for journalism to catch up and preserve all the things we have held so highly in the past. Keen writes that there is a need to control it so that it "enriches and doesn’t undermine our economy, culture, and values."
And that “web 2.0 participatory media is reshaping our intellectual, political, and commercial landscape…Our challenge…is to protect the legacy of our mainstream media and two hundred years of copyright protections within the context of twenty-first-century digital technology. Our goal should be to preserve our culture, and our values, while enjoying the benefits of today’s internet capabilities. We need to find a way to balance the best of the digital future without destroying the institutions of the past.”
Web 2.0, the second generation of web communities that encourage user participation, has changed our lives dramatically. It has made our world smaller by connecting people with the same interests and it has made our possibilities endless with the amount of information available. It has also made our lives easier than we could have ever imagined by saving us time and money. Why pay $250 for a subscription to The New York Times when it could be emailed to your inbox for free? Why pay for a classified ad in a newspaper when there’s Craigslist? And why buy a CD when you can download it faster and cheaper on iTunes? The point is, the web is changing our culture. It is making our lives easier, faster, and cheaper. And while the web is definitely saving us something, whether it be time, money, or confusion, what are we paying for in the end?
This question becomes particularly important when it comes to the news media. News has been gravitating online and blogs have enabled more selection, opinion, links, and user commentary--leaving print journalism and the news“paper” in the dust. The loss of a traditional newspaper to online media, blogs and citizen journalism is making us lose more than just paper and ink. It is making us lose a tradition of long form writing, prose that has been nurtured and perfected, real shoe-leather reporting that takes time and for those nostalgists, the thing we read while drinking coffee and eating breakfast. The web is costing us something and it might be traditions and values rooted in our culture.
BLOGS AND CITIZEN JOURNALISTS: THE DEBATE
The whole idea behind citizen journalism is that anyone can be a journalist—it doesn’t have to be left to the professionals. The ability to blog allows access to a medium that was traditionally dominated by big business and the elite few. Blogging's low barrier to entry, meaning that anyone can start a blog in a matter of minutes without cost, is appealing. Blogging gives the amateur a chance to voice his or her opinions, ideas, and thoughts without an editor. And now blogging has turned into something else, something that can even make a profit, with the help of a few banner ads and links from Google.
Today, blogs are more popular than ever and some blogs are considered news sources to many people who get their news on the internet.
A PEW Internet study in 2006 found that 73 percent of all internet users get their news from the internet. Eight percent of internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog and 39 percent or about 57 million American adults read blogs. Whether reading or writing, blogs are part of American life and this is only increasing.
NYU Professor Jay Rosen writes in his blog PressThink that "the people formally known as the audience" are taking a permanent seat in the changing world of journalism and we need to focus on that.
In some ways, citizen journalism can make traditional journalism stronger. There is the idea of power in numbers, which was shown in the Rathergate scandal, when within hours of PBS posting the documents Dan Rather used on 60 minutes to suggest President Bush got special treatment in the Texas Air National Guard, bloggers called into question whether the documents were forgeries. The idea here is that no one knows everything but everyone knows something. This can be particularly useful, especially with fact-checking.
Sometimes, citizen journalists are even able to give us something traditional journalists just can’t because of money and time constraints. During the tsunami in 2004, bloggers were able to give better accounts than some news outlets because they were on the scene and could offer photos, videos, and first-person accounts. Bloggers quickly became the source of information for some news outlets as well as the public.
The value of citizen journalism also lies in the fact that they can cater to niche markets that the mainstream media just can’t, whether it’s because of money or because of staff. People will be able to get the news that they want regardless if the mainstream media covers it.
Even though citizen journalism can be effective,there is the looming question of how to distinguish between the work of an expert and the work of an amateur. There are blogs that have risen to the top and become reputable. Arianna Huffington launched her blog The Huffington Post in 2005 and now has one of the most widely read liberal blogs on the web. She was even named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in 2006. Her website is only growing bigger and more reputable and she even told Time that she wanted to add more video and investigative pieces to the site.
But even if bloggers haven’t been so reputable and gotten some stories wrong, they--like the mainstream media--have been able to redeem themselves. Matt Drudge's Drudge Report, has made countless mistakes, claiming in the past that Sen. John Kerry had an affair with an intern or recently writing a false headline about Sen. Hilary Clinton and her health plan. Yet his website is stil checked for updates by everyone on capitol hill on an hourly basis.
EFFECTS ON CULTURE
The reality is, as Jack Shafer writes on Slate, newspapers have been dying for eighty years and news organizations must make the shift to become multi-platform. Columnist Mark Morford, of SF Gate wrote that newspapers are making a shift. “They are merely shifting, peeling back, juggling approaches and reorganizing ideas, all in order to be reborn, In order to adapt. In order to compete and breathe and thrive and become the new-thing.”
But with this shift and rebirth, will come a transformation in writing and traditional journalistic values. Short prose that the reader can scan is preferred online. With blogging, short posts, written several times a day and filled with opinion is the norm (excluding, Rosen's PressThink, which goes against the grain by featuring a longer form). It’s not preferred to read something long form on a computer screen--at least until eINK, a company that produces flexible e-paper, has come up with something worthwhile.
And its not just Strunk and White's values that will disappear. Bloggers and citizen journalists aren’t held to the same standards as professional journalists are. In In Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, he writes that bloggers aren’t held accountable for their work. They don’t go to jail to protect a source and they are rarely sued or prosecuted because the government and corporations don’t seem to care what they write.
The Dean of Columbia University and skeptic of citizen journalism, Nicholas Lemann wrote an article for The New Yorker a year ago titled “Amateur Hour: Journalism without Journalists,” saying that he doesn’t feel blogs rise to the level of a “journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the old media—to function as a replacement rather than an addendum.
Keen explains in his book that “this blurring of lines between the audience and the author, between fact and fiction, between invention and reality further obscures objectivity. The cult of the amateur has made it increasingly difficult to determine the difference between reader and writer, between artist and spin doctor…between amateur and expert.”
The result? Keen writes, the decline in quality and reliability of information we receive. The web will make a different form of journalism the norm, not because it's trying to, but because it is easier, faster, and cheaper. Short writing takes less time to read and opinion is easier than objective reporting to write. Readers will come to expect a different quality in their news. A quality in which the writer might not stand up for his/her work, in which sources are not valued, and in which they might not have gone to great lengths to produce accurate and reliable information.
If our traditional form of journalism is not preserved, will the former ethics and values simply disappear? Will journalism become sloppy and lazy in order to conform to our fast and easy lifestyle and most importantly, what kind of effect will this have on our society?
Perspective is reality and if our perspective changes, how can traditions and values be preserved. Hal Crowther, columnist of The Independent weekly (North Carolina) writes that “while the newspaper is expendable, the tradition it represents and the information it supplies are not…if professional journalism vanishes along with the newspapers, this thing we call a constitutional democracy becomes a banana republic.”
SOLUTIONS
So what is the solution to all this? There may not be one and it just might take time to see where everything is going.
Rosen wrote on PressThink that “the question now isn’t whether blogs can be journalism. They can be, sometimes. It isn’t whether bloggers ‘are’ journalists. They apparently are, sometimes….They’re even capable at times, and perhaps only in special circumstances, of beating Big journalism at its own game.” He suggests pro-am (professional-amateur journalism)as a solution and has his own project, Newassignment.net, does just that.
Rosen explained on his blog that the site uses open source methods to develop assignments that could be completed by both professional journalists, who set high standards for the work, as well as people who donate to works they like and see are advancing. Most "donators" would be people who are interested in the news. They would also want to contribute because Newassignment.net would do journalism that the mainstream media doesn't do.
Newassignment.net said on its website that its mission is to "spark innovation in 'open platform' journalism, distributed reporting and what’s now called crowd sourcing...We think the hybrid forms—mixing professional journalists and amateur contributors—are going to be the strongest forms, and we’re attempting to show they have potential."
One of their first assignments, called Assignment Zero was with Wired and upon completion it was termed, a "a highly satisfying failure." Rosen wrote that they ran into organizational and inspirational problems as well as how to assign people tasks. He noted that just because contributers signed up, doesn't mean they will participate..."You still have to convince them that participating is a good option, that it won’t waste their time, that they will know what to do, or be able to figure it out."
Rosen also wrote that the project was well worth it and that, "At the end I felt I had the challenge more squarely in my sights and I am not nearly so clueless now."
What can be learned with Rosen's project is that there is still a need for professional journalism--for many reasons, down to the most obvious: a simple interest in doing it.
Although the web is growing at a fast pace, there may be time for journalism to catch up and preserve all the things we have held so highly in the past. Keen writes that there is a need to control it so that it "enriches and doesn’t undermine our economy, culture, and values."
And that “web 2.0 participatory media is reshaping our intellectual, political, and commercial landscape…Our challenge…is to protect the legacy of our mainstream media and two hundred years of copyright protections within the context of twenty-first-century digital technology. Our goal should be to preserve our culture, and our values, while enjoying the benefits of today’s internet capabilities. We need to find a way to balance the best of the digital future without destroying the institutions of the past.”
Additional Resources
Keen, Andrew, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture. New York: Doubleday 2007
Keen, Andrew, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture. New York: Doubleday 2007
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