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Citizen Journalism: When Does it Work?
by Rachel Merkhofer, posted December 10, 2007
"Citizen journalism" is an important term in discussions about web journalism, but it means different things to different people. Assignment Zero's glossary of terms provides a good definition here:
Citizen journalism is type of user-generated content. It simply describes the different kinds of journalism people can do on their own, without media companies or journalism professionals necessarily involved. This can be as simple as leaving a comment on a news story that adds information the reporter left out, or as demanding as covering a public hearing for a self-published blog.The term "citizen journalism" has often been criticized, and several alternatives have been proposed (see the list here, for example). The techniques used in citizen journalism have been criticized less often. Critiques,like this New Yorker article or this Los Angeles Times editorial, usually say that "citizen journalism" doesn't really produce journalism. An analysis of citizen journalism and its criticism will show that although the phrase may be problematic, the techniques of citizen journalism have already produced valuable new pieces of journalism that wouldn't have come about any other way.
Criticisms of citizen journalism often boil down to semantic arguments. A Press Gazette article by Martin Stade explains one critique of the phrase: "It objects to the word 'journalism', because the vast bulk of the material being created by bloggers and users of photosharing sites such as Flickr never intended to commit acts of journalism. In fact, most so-called 'citizen journalists' are simply using these new tools in a semi-public way that established media thinking cannot comprehend."
The article also says that others object to the term because journalists are citizens, too: "Journalists are citizens — indeed modern journalism is the professional exercise of a right of citizenship." Mark Glaser agrees in a post at MediaShift: "The terms citizen journalism and citizen journalist are not popular among traditional journalists or even the people who are doing citizen journalism at the ground level because they are imprecise definitions. Aren’t professional journalists citizens as well?"
In a BuzzMachine post, Jeff Jarvis says that the term "citizen journalism" is problematic because it "divides journalism into distinct camps, which only prolongs a problem of professional journalism — its separation from its public." He prefers the term "networked journalism," because it emphasizes professionals and non-professionals working together.
These critiques of the term "citizen journalism" are all solid, but why worry about semantics when whatever you call it, changes are happening in journalism? Let "networked journalism" prevail if people like it better, but the examples of journalism coming out of blogs and web sites are the real story here.
In a New Yorker article, Amateur Hour, Nicholas Leman says that blogs are more like opinion columns and church newsletters--sometimes nice, but definitely not journalism. But there are plenty of examples of citizen journalism working. In the post at MediaShift, Glaser says "One of the main concepts behind citizen journalism is that mainstream media reporters and producers are not the exclusive center of knowledge on a subject — the audience knows more collectively than the reporter alone." The following cases show that whether you agree with the term "citizen journalism" or not, people who are not professional journalists have contributed to some important news stories on the internet that could not have been written the same way without them.
An early example of citizen journalism occurred in 1999 when an editor of Jane's Intelligence Review decided to share an article about cyberterrorism on Slashdot beforepublishing it, to give Slashdot readers a chance to improve the article. The editor ended up writing a whole new article, using information from the comments. At Salon.com, Andrew Leonard explains how the technique used in the cyberterrorism story is often called "open-source journalism," because like open-source software, it is open to scrutiny and made available to anyone who wants to suggest changes. In a blog post about open source journalism, Dan Gillmor emphasizes that "the important thing is the parallel activity by large numbers of people, in service of something that would be difficult if not impossible for any one or small group of them to do alone, at least in a timely way."
Leonard was writing in 1999, and he was unsure about the future of web journalism. He says, "Open-source pragmatists believe that better software arises from the scrutiny inherent in the collaborative process. Will better journalism ensue if more reporters and editors beta test their own work? Hard to say." In the years since 1999, other citizen journalism possibilities have also emerged.
EPluribus Media has a timeline of hurricane Katrina that was put together by posters on the ePluribus Media community. It contains "over 500 events, fact-checked and sourced, document the devastation, the political shenanigans, and the struggles of the people living on the Gulf Coast." The events come from the mainstream media, but the message board posters helped to create an aggregation of information that would not exist without them. The site contains information from newspapers, television news, government web sites, and other official sources put together in a way that is easily accessible. This isn't citizen journalism in the same way that citizens going out and producing their own material about Katrina would be, but it is still important if you value an aggregation of information about a news event. Aaron Barlow at Newassignment.net says it's journalism:
ePluribus Media can put together a network of stories and information (its timelines, for example) that can be useful to other journalists as a story continues to unfold and, more importantly, to a citizenry hungry for the information that can make it more able to participate effectively in the public sphere—as actor and not simply observer. By providing a horizontal structure, the organization provides something that can mesh (instead of competing) with the vertical structures of the commercial news media.Another example of citizen journalism comes from Bryan Lehrer's radio show on WNYC. The project is simple, and explained here at wnyc.org: "Our latest 'crowdsourcing' project asks listeners to go to their local grocery store and find out the price of three goods: milk, lettuce and beer. We've mapped the results below." The maps reveal trends in grocery pricing that would be very difficult for a single reporter to compile. If a reporter had done so, it would be an interesting piece of investigative reporting. Why shouldn't it be thought of as reporting when listeners compile the information? No one is saying that a listener who enters the price of milk onto a website is doing as much work as a full-time reporter would. And Lehrer still had to analyze the results on his show. But if enough listeners enter in just a little information, the end result can be a great story.
Citizen journalism can influence hard political news as well. The blog Talking Points Memo, run by Josh Marshall, was able to gather information about the firings of US Attorneys in early 2007 and push the issue into the national spotlight. A March 2007 Los Angeles Times article explains: "Talking Points Memo and one of its sister sites, TPM Muckraker, accumulated evidence from around the country on who the axed prosecutors were, and why politics might be behind the firings. The cause was taken up among Democrats in Congress." The article says Talking Points Memo succeeded because the blog was able to "deputize those readers as editorial researchers, in effect multiplying the reporting power by an order of magnitude." Columbia Journalism Review writer Paul McLeary says Talking Points Memo was successful because they found a way of "mixing of tips from readers, hitting the phones, and ferreting out tidbits in local papers."
Three years earlier, Talking Points Memo was part of another example of successful citizen journalism. Marshall started by criticizing a piece of legislation known as the DeLay Rule in Talking Points Memo posts from November 2004. Bloomberg.com explains the rule: " On a voice vote, the House Republican Conference changed a rule that required party leaders to step down if indicted for any crime that carries a prison sentence of two or more years. Now other Republican leaders would have 30 days to review a felony indictment and make recommendations to all House Republicans about whether the person should step aside". Since the rule passed on a voice vote, the vote was not recorded. Marshall asked his readers with Republican representatives to call their representatives and ask how they voted, and collected the responses. The result was a list of how the Republican Conference voted on the issue.
Jay Rosen praised the effort in a post on his blog, PressThink, and said he used it as an example at a conference because "it made 'citizens journalism' a lot less abstract." He addressed concerns that the information gathered by non-journalists would be unreliable, saying "Talking Points Memo was widely read on Capital Hill. Staffers for a Republican Congressman would know if Marshall had screwed up. They’d fire off an e-mail right away to correct the record."
Stephen Baker also talked about the Talking Points Memo list in the blog he writes for BusinessWeek. He concluded that
As a reader, I’m happy to look at that citizens’ reporting. It’s additive. There was nothing. Now there’s something. True, the anonymous reporters are not accountable for their work. So I wouldn’t cite it, journalistically, as evidence that a certain Republican voted one way or another. But there are many ways we glean information in this world. This is one of them, and it’s welcome.In the comments on a post at PressThink, head of the Center for Citizens Media Dan Gillmor saysthis kind of reporting works best with a person, or a few people, in charge of organizing it. "What we’re discussing here are projects that can be broken down into little pieces where lots and lots of people can ask one question, or look at one document, or solve on piece of a big puzzle. Then the results are aggregated, parsed and reassembled into a coherent whole. It’ll almost always require some folks at the center."
There are also examples of citizen journalism not working, or not working as well as people hoped. Assignment Zero, a project from Newassignment.net and Wired.com, produced mixed results at best. An article at Wired.com says that according to Rosen, "only 28 percent of Assignment Zero worked."
As Rosen explained in a PressThink post, Assignment Zero was created with some big questions in mind: "Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?"
How did Assignment Zero set out to look at those questions? According to a press release announcing it's launch, it was "an attempt to bring together professional writers and editors with citizen journalists to collaborate on reporting and writing about the rise of crowdsourcing on the Web." The envisioned cohesive piece about crowdsourcing never became a reality. But other positive things did come from Assignment Zero.
Jeff Howe writes about the results of Assignment Zero here at Wired.com. He says, "Although Assignment Zero produced a strong body of work, consisting of seven original essays and some 80 Q&As, the real value of the exercise was discovery. We learned a lot about how crowds come together, and what's required to organize them well. But many of the lessons came too late to help Assignment Zero." The part of Assignment Zero that was most successful ended up being a series of interviews, where editors asked participants to each conduct and transcribe one interview. Howe says "In my rough count, at least 60 of the 80 interviews would stand up to professional scrutiny, which is to say the interviewer was well-informed, asked challenging questions and managed to elicit interesting (and occasionally fascinating) commentary from his or her subject."
Though Assignment Zero was only partly successful, the model of pro-am journalism--editors and amateurs working together--that the project used may be where the most exciting changes occur in the future. At Wired.com, Rosen says " I wouldn't say it's easy for widely scattered people working together voluntarily on the net to report on a big story unfolding in many places at once. But we know a lot more about it now than we did when we started, and one of the goals of Assignment Zero was to test whether pro-am methods had potential. I think they do." His latest project tries a different path towards realizing that potential.
At beatblogging.org, 13 reporters from a variety of news agencies have partnered with newassignment.net in an effort to use blogging to improve the beats they already work on. Participants come from publications including Wired.com, the San Jose Mercury News, the Newark Star-Ledger, and ESPN.com. Jay Rosen explains the idea behind the project on his blog, PressThink: "Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a 'live' social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better." Rosen also talks about how this is different from the way that beat reporters have traditionally gathered sources, saying "Beat reporters have always had networks of sources, of course, but the sources haven’t been connected to one another, or able to self-publish; they haven’t been social networks at all. And we didn’t have the easy tools for Web-based collaboration that we have now, like group blogs, wikis, Facebook groups and so on." The idea is that the blogging part of beatblogging.org will allow sources to network with each other, as well as with the journalist who is covering their beat. This project has just begun, so time will tell how successful it will be.
Neil McIntosh from Completetosh.com explains what he thinks will happen to citizen journalism in a post at his blog. He says, "So where does this leave us? Well, increasingly, I believe that one of the next steps in online journalism is going to be about the various elements in this story - professional journalists, amateur storytellers, editors, computer-powered aggregators - finding their place in the structure, supporting one another and doing things the others can’t." Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review agrees that more voices in online news will lead to more and better information, saying "Success lies not in fighting competing voices, but in embracing them. With more voices reporting, journalists now can reveal a more complete and accurate truth for their readers." John McQuaid also thinks citizen journalism methods will help journalists do a better job reporting the news. In an interview with Rosen, McQuaid says "With connectivity anywhere and everywhere, journalists tapping into networks can have eyes on the ground in a lot of places simultaneously. That has all kinds of potential — for assembling a broad picture of what’s going on nationally, for individual tips and stories." And Gillmor is hopeful in his post, saying "The potential for distributed journalism to be a key part of tomorrow's news strikes me as immense. We in citizen journalism -- and, if we're smart, in professional journalism -- can focus the energy and knowledge of regular folks, and especially their willingness to do some small amount of legwork to help feed a larger whole, on all kinds of things." Whether or not these methods are still called citizen journalism in the future, the techniques have already produced good journalism. Although the phrase "citizen journalism" may be on the way out, the practices will continue.
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, Dec 10 2007, 10:51 AM EST
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