gor[b] Paul Gorbould: Words and Pictures

Citizen Kane Journalism

In my line of work, you can't read 10 words without bumping up against the big debate du jour: citizen journalism.

It's a concept that I've been geeked about for a decade. But now that it's here, I'm among its biggest skeptics.

What is citizen journalism? According to the classic definition, it's simply citizens "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information."

It's strictly an invention of the internet age. Bloggers tend to think they invented "participatory journalism", but I'm told it dates back to Ronald Reagan's 1988 trouncing of Michael Dukakis.

At that time, the argument goes, "the public" (more on that in a moment) grew disillusioned with politics and the press. The burgeoning internet gave them the tools to do something about it.

The internet gave non-journalists the ability to communicate quickly and broadly, checking facts, dispelling fiction, spreading the truth – or at least a version of it that big media had no interest in promulgating. Publishing was no longer limited to big buck corporations and a controlling elite.

[I imagine someone said the same thing around the time of Gutenberg (pamphleteers were the first bloggers) - but I digress.]

Sometimes it works

It's difficult (and stupid) to ignore the numerous occasions when internet community got the story out quicker, or better.

Matt Drudge broke the Lewinski Scandal; Bloggers revealed the true extent of opposition to the war in Iraq; Wikipedia became the defacto source to follow the unfolding story of the 2005 London Bombings. And if you want to see if something is true or false, you'll do better at The Smoking Gun or Snopes than anything traditional media can offer.

So far so good – I'm a fan of quicker and better. Who isn't?

Try it, you’ll like it

I got my first taste of participatory journalism last year during the CBC lockout. I helped put together an employee website called CBC On The line. Within a week we were posting hundreds of news stories, profiles, and photos from locked-out CBCers across the country. An even more ambitious project, CBC Unlocked, actually offered a news service that competed with the skeleton crew CBC.ca site.

Even more impressive was the replacement journalism offered by bloggers. Dozens of high-quality blogs sprouted overnight, along with Flickr galleries, podcasts and more. Tod Maffin's CBCUnplugged and mystery manager Ouimet's Teamakers blog became the highly addictive first stops for everyone on both sides of the fight.

It should be pointed out, however, that locked-out journalists are not your average citizen. I didn't see anything similar when transit workers or hockey players had labour disputes of their own.

Skill set aside, there's ample enough proof that non-journos can and do play an active role in "collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating" etc. But is this really the end of the reign of traditional journalism?

Some would seem to think so. Who can forget Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson's chilling online feature EPIC 2014 depicting the whimpering demise of journalism to the new tools of the cyber age.

In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline. The fourth estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is EPIC?

I figure EPIC 2014 will prove as predictive about writing as 2001: A Space Odyssey is about travel. But there's a seed there, no?

Online, there's an endless gung-ho enthusiasm for this new people power (sorry, "empowering the users", to use the BloggerCon term.) In a piece provocatively titled The People Formerly Known as the Audience, Jay Rosen details the new manifesto:

The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

Brash new world

The situation has certainly changed. Anyone can publish. Writing can be fun, and blogging can be addictive (which is why I'm writing this blog now instead of working)

But I also know that what I’m doing right now isn’t journalism. I’m a journalist. I know the difference. (As the aforementioned Ouimet recently wrote, “You're not a citizen journalist until you find yourself on vacation with a camera in your hands, watching a tsunami. And even then, the job lasts only a few minutes. If you survive.”)

A few months ago I commissioned writer Cory Doctorow to write a piece on this subject for the CBC.ca 10th anniversary site.

In his article, Doctorow bids good riddance to the media-as-gatekeeper world. He argues that we’ve gone from a media-controlled “select then publish” model to a “publish then select” model.

In essence, all the smart people in the world are free to put something out there, and it’s up to us to pick what we want to believe. And if they aren’t credible, they are ignored, or they fix it:

Wikipedia gets it wrong all the time. So do bloggers. But then, so do newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. The interesting thing about systems isn't how they perform when they're working to specification, it's what happens when they fail....if you find an error in a Wikipedia entry, you can fix it yourself. You can join the discussion about whether a blogger got it wrong. Automated tools like Technorati link together all the different blogs discussing the same topic, turning them into a conversation.

Here’s the thing, though: as the number of voices in the conversation expands, the need for good old-fashioned reliable professional voices become more and more pressing.

As I pointed out in the discussion of Doctorow's essay, the need for experts and gatekeepers is becoming more important, not less.

The online world is certainly moving toward becoming an enormous storehouse of stuff, more than any person can handle individually. The two strategies for dealing with it are either search it (viz Google, Gmail, YouTube, etc.) or get someone (or some thing) to recommend what's relevant. But you need to do one or the other, because the vast majority of what is out there is crap (or, to be kind, uninteresting to you.)

While there's lots to be said for marquee bloggers, voting and send to a friend, there's also a role for professionals. People whose careers, reputations and paycheques rely on being knowledgeable, cultivating connections, getting the facts right, and seeing the bigger picture. The rest of the internet can add an incredibly valuable layer to those underpinnings - fact checking, comparing, linking, outing bias, etc. - but it doesn't replace it.

In essence, the louder the conversation gets, the more obvious the need for a moderator becomes.

Old dogs, new tricks

Lately, people have been envisioning traditional media as that moderator – using their expertise, resources, credibility and profile to become a facilitator of citizen journalism. We Media nicely outlines the proposed partnership:

We are at the beginning of a Golden Age of journalism — but it is not journalism as we have known it. Media futurists have predicted that by 2021, "citizens will produce 50 percent of the news peer-to-peer." However, mainstream news media have yet to meaningfully adopt or experiment with these new forms.

Historically, journalists have been charged with informing the democracy. But their future will depend not on only how well they inform but how well they encourage and enable conversations with citizens. That is the challenge.

For the CBC.ca 10thsite, I worked with Clive Thompson, another great writer who offered a similar take:

So this is how journalists in the future will capture the protean attention-span of society: They'll make it easy for the online world to engage with them.

And, interestingly, they won't try and dictate what the most "important" stories are. Indeed, they'll have to relinquish the very idea that they have the cultural inside track - that they are the ones dictating the agenda of society's attention span. That's because the internet has a way of figuring out what it finds most interesting - and half the time it's never what we journalists would expect.

In Canada, some see the CBC as the perfect vehicle. Says Michael Geist:

Canadian stories are being told in record numbers, yet they are not found on the CBC. The Internet is their home.

The CBC has developed an impressive online presence, yet the majority of the content is based on the traditional broadcast model that places a premium on control. The next-generation CBC would do well to partner with the public by loosening restrictions and encouraging the dissemination of Canadian content from a broader range of sources.

I asked Doctorow for his view, and he concurs:

A public service broadcaster that wants to truly provide a service to the public can do better than merely producing yet another account of events. It can provide tools to help its audience explore the story as it emerges.

I have to ask, though: Has anyone actually seen this work?

Contrary to what the “former audience” claims (and they don’t really claim to have stopped tuning in to the old boys’ networks – they just want a piece) it isn’t through lack of interest.

There have been some worthy experiments, some – not enough – at CBC. There are new voices on air, new columnists online. ZeD put new filmmakers on television. Some have been intriguing; others came off as Amateur Night at the CBC.

I’m all in favour of freeing up more resources to facilitate Canadian content online, and CBC is uniquely positioned to do so (I have no idea at all why private networks would bother – nobody has sufficiently demonstrated that there's money in it.) Never mind the fact that all such projects that I’ve worked on – and there have been a couple – have failed miserably.

The internet was always supposed to be a two-way street, and not just as “CB Radio for the 90s”.

And the CBC mandate does call on us to “actively contribute to the flow and exchange of cultural expression.” Whether or not it's a good use of Canadian tax dollars is another discussion.

Chariot of the Proletariat?

But shouldn't this unstoppable people's revolution be able to get by just fine without big media?

The two things big media has always had in its favour are resources and audience. But it no longer has a monopoly on either. We are not living out some twisted version of media Marxism, where the great unwashed first need capitalism to build the means of production, but then takes it over.

The new technology has eliminated barriers to entry. And if the content produced is interesting enough, the former audience should, in theory, become the new audience of new journalism.

Except that it hasn't. Of all the millions of websites, blogs, podcasts and so on, it's a pretty thin slice that can compete with news and information prepared by professionals. There are exceptions, but it's an awful lot of work to find them.

Don't get me wrong. There are surely plenty of ways that the professional and amateur strata can work together, and I hope to be a part of whatever experiments come next. The symbiosis has potential – when it comes to storytelling and audience, each level has a lot to learn.

But enough with the delusions of grandeur, on both sides. Traditional media can't ignore citizen journalism any more than it should simply hand over the keys to the shop. There's a relationship to forge, but it isn't peer-to-peer.

Blaming "the media" is a tired cop-out. If citizen journalism wants a permanent place on the news map, it had better earn it.

Tags: journalism, citizen journalism, media, gorbould, gor[b]