Tag: citizen journalism

Beth Israel Deaconess president Paul Levy has posted an interesting item on his blog about the future of the Globe. His suggestion: Use the Web to transform the Globe into an online community, with blogger contributions running alongside the paper’s journalism. He even proposes paying bloggers with some sort of Globe scrip to buy goodies or make charitable donations. He writes:

All of sudden, regardless of actual ownership, this is now our newspaper. You have given me a reason to check in, to participate, to feel pride, and to feel a sense that you are relevant to our community in a variety of ways.

For the CEO of a major institution to embrace the “news as a conversation” model espoused by citizen-journalism advocates is an important step. Levy gets it. I also think Globe editors get it more than he gives them credit for, but he’s right to argue that they need to turn the battleship around faster than they’ve managed so far.

Update: Adam Reilly thinks we disagree. I’m not so sure. I take Levy’s suggestion as an “in addition to” sort of idea, not an “instead of.” Ideally, the Globe would foster a community around its journalism, not sacrifice the journalism for the sake of community.

If the tragedy at Virginia Tech has produced a media star, it is surely Jamal Albarghouti, the graduate student who captured some as-it-happened video of the gunfire on his cell-phone camera. The video was posted on CNN.com and shown repeatedly on the cable channel. Albarghouti himself has been the subject of frequent interviews.

But is Albarghouti’s bravery and striking footage an example of citizen journalism at its best? Interestingly enough, NewAssignment.Net, a virtual watering hole for the citizen-journalism movement, has given voice to some skepticism. Steve Fox writes:

Consider this: the video had no inherent news value and told no story.

It did have sounds of bullets being fired and screams.

Those were bullets that killed, maimed and injured students and faculty members. This wasn’t a video game.

Is such video responsible journalism? Are these the types of Citizen Journalists that people want to see? Are we doomed to create “citizen journalists” to play the I-patsies for cable television?

Adds John McQuaid: “What is the value of something ‘live’ if you don’t know what you’re looking at? Cable execs will disagree, but ‘live and on-scene’ is not an end in itself.”

At the Citizen Media Center blog, Dan Gillmor takes a more sanguine view of how amateur and professional journalism has come together to cover the Virginia Tech story. And at Poynter.org, Al Tompkins has an extensive roundup of how students — including some hiding under desks — got out information about shootings via text messages, blogs and online forums. “If you ever had a doubt about how important it is for your newsroom to be able to tap into user-generated content, the Virginia Tech story will change that,” Tompkins writes.

What’s at a premium in confusing breaking-news stories such as this is perspective and understanding. As Fox and McQuaid suggest, the problem with the Albarghouti video isn’t that it was produced by a citizen journalist, but that it provided no context, and only added to the confusion. It was dramatic, so CNN showed it. But news has to be about more than that.

On Monday evening, I was flipping through the cable news channels, and quickly wound up watching a documentary on U.S. soldiers in Iraq instead. Why? Well, the news value of what the cable nets were reporting could be summed up in a minute or two. The rest was filler, some of it harmless, some of it not.

CNN was showing an interview with Albarghouti — and Larry King was threatening to put Dr. Phil on. I took the threat seriously and left. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly had right-wing pundette Michelle Malkin; her presence struck me as so weirdly inappropriate that I confess I didn’t stick around long enough to hear what she had to say. On MSNBC, Keith Olbermann was actually asking someone from washingtonpost.com what effect the shootings might have on the presidential campaign. Answer: Who knows?

I also heard it “reported” that it appeared the shooter was Chinese and not a student. Of course, as we soon learned, he was Korean and was indeed a student. What on earth is the value of these unverified tidbits, shoveled out there as fast as they come in and just as likely to be wrong as right? The Politico‘s Ben Smith must wonder why he got singled out for wrongly reporting that John Edwards would suspend his presidential campaign. Smith’s screw-up, after all, was hardly unique.

I don’t entirely agree with Fox and McQuaid. Surely Albarghouti’s video has some news value. But it wasn’t the story — it was part of a much bigger story. If the video lacks perspective — and it does — then it’s the media’s fault for showing it without providing that perspective.

Vin Crosbie says he’s heard enough about citizen journalism — or at least about the fantastical claims that are sometimes made for it:

It’s hard enough to find a professional journalist who can sit through 52 weeks of zoning board hearings and write intelligently about that, nonetheless finding an amateur who doesn’t have a vested interest or axe to grind and who can sit through and objectively write about those hearings….

[D]on’t get me wrong. I think that technologies via which readers can comment, help report, eyewitness, tip off, and otherwise supplement, amplify, or redirect newspaper coverage are absolutely needed. These are tools that every news organization should begin using (oops, I should have used the politically correct phrase: ‘begin sharing’) with people. I applaud BlufftonToday.com and other well conceived applications of this. And I support my friends who are helping to teach citizen journalism to the few citizens who do want to report.

But citizen journalism is a supplement, not a panacea. Citizen journalism itself isn’t going to reverse the declines in news readership, listernership, and viewership. Not by a longshot.

I agree. Citizen journalism is well worth trying, and could definitely be part of the mix that one day revives the news business. But there is nothing that brings more value to the table than reporting by professional journalists. It’s expensive, and there are no shortcuts.

A small television station in Santa Rosa, Calif., has eliminated most of its news staff and will replace its evening newscasts with contributions from citizen journalists. The station, KFTY-TV, is owned by Clear Channel. Thus, this has all the makings of a profit-driven fiasco — a perversion of the promise of citizen journalism.

But you know what? Clear Channel’s bottom-line-driven motivation aside, this might prove worthwhile. As the ironically named station executive Steve Spendlove is quoted as saying, “There will be a loss in local coverage, I’m not going to lie to you. But there are a lot of other places to get most of that information.”

It’s hard to tell from this Wikipedia entry how well-served the Santa Rosa area is. But assuming that residents still have two or three local newscasts from which to choose, having another outlet doing something completely different strikes me as something well worth trying.

Here is another story on the Santa Rosa situation. And here is the KFTY Web site.

Frank Beacham, in an essay at TVTechnology.com, identifies the biggest challenge facing citizen journalism: the relentless attempts by corporate media companies to co-opt well-meaning amateur reporters, photographers and videographers into giving away their work in order to fatten someone else’s bottom line.

Beacham is especially upset with Yahoo and Reuters, which are teaming up to add citizen contributions to their mix while paying little or nothing for them. Beacham writes:

It’s a good thing that Abraham Zapruder, the pioneering citizen journalist who aimed his 8mm movie camera toward the Kennedy motorcade in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, was not dealing with Reuters. It’s doubtful he would have gotten the $150,000 payment — about half a million in today’s currency — when he sold the footage to Life magazine.

Who do these media companies think they are fooling? They are making a blatant attempt to build news organizations based on free user- provided content.

There is, however, a significant flaw in the corporate-defined citizen-journalism model. Good journalism may be hard, but technology is easy. And rather than giving it away to Yahoo, Reuters et al., most citizen journalists are doing it themselves.

Earlier this week the Knight Citizen News Network released an important new report titled “Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News?” Unlike Beacham’s essay, the Knight report focuses on so-called hyperlocal journalism — blogs dedicated to one community, or even to just a neighborhood.

And, here, the DIY ethic is alive and well. I haven’t had a chance to do more than skim the report, but I can tell you that the focus is on independent sites. Many of these are being run by professional journalists with an eye toward making a profit, such as the New Haven Independent and Baristanet — a new opportunity for journalists trying to survive in a shrinking business. Some corporate media experiments, such as GateHouse’s Wicked Local sites in Eastern Massachusetts, are given a look as well.

I think it’s likely — or at least I hope — that the very real problem identified by Beacham will turn out to be self-correcting. Corporate media executives who genuinely want to use citizen-media tools to build community and experiment with new business models will be rewarded for their efforts.

But those who think they can profit by suckering amateurs into giving away their content will soon discover that what they’ve created a host of new competitors.