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]
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 07-19-2006 | 05:07 PM
Posted in: Blogging | Teh Internets
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You’re among it’s biggest skeptics? Says who? I don’t find you skeptical at all. You are confused, a debunker who can’t manage to figure out what he’s debunking, or show that it exists. But you want us to know you aren’t ga ga over “citizen journalism.” Fine. No ga ga for Paul.
You believe in it, you don’t believe it. You want to be shown the evidence, you’ve seen the evidence. You write in a flip, surface-skimming style but claim to see big deep changes afoot. It’s not for lack of trying but there hasn’t been enough trying.
The delusions of grandeur should stop, and they should stop from both sides (which sides are those?) but you aren’t willing to quote them and identify what’s delued in them.
Do you know why you chose the title “Citizen Kane Journalism?” Bet you don’t. If you do it’s not in your post.
Now that you have said it does–does, does, does–remind me again: who said citizen journalism doesn’t have to earn its place on the news map? Who? Do you know who? Did you put them in your post? Or did you just want to debunk them without letting them make an appearance?
Now that you’ve asked “is this really the end of the reign of traditional journalism?” would you mind telling us a.) what the referent for “this” is; and b.) who ever said “this” was the end?
Certainly I didn’t in my post, The People Formerly Known as the Audience. You want people to think I am one of the ga-gas, even though you agree with the passage you quoted, “the situation has changed.” That’s cheap.
Your phrase “endless gung-ho enthusiasm for this new people power” is cheap too. My post says there is a shifted power situation, a lost monopoly for Big Media. It doesn’t say (crudely) “Now the people have all the power!” It doesn’t say anything like that. If you think it does you didn’t read carefully.
Your piece is cheap, confusing and adds to the hype you think you are distancing yourself from. You need to go back, start over and figure out what you have learned, and what you want to say, having learned it. Write about your own disappointments and delusions. Don’t charge other people with them.
If you think certain people have been wrong to raise expectations too high, then name them, find what they said that was wrong–deluded, as you charge–and examine it.
I can tell you this, Paul. If in 06 I’ve had 100 conversations about traditional journalism being replaced by citizens media, 99 of them have been initiated by journalists working in big news organizations like yours. It’s your hype. Own it.
And I thought nobody was listening. Thanks for your comments; cutting as they are, they are appreciated.
I’m flattered that you’ve mistaken me – certainly me, the blogger – for someone whose opinion is worthy of such a rebuttal. Sure, I work for the CBC by day, but this nine-post blog ain’t that. (You did see that my previous post was about turkey entrails, right?) If anyone conflates the two, it probably proves my point (or yours.)
Regardless of which hat I’m wearing, I’m happy to stand behind what I write. I’ll address a few of your immediate charges first, but then I want to get to the point, which you’ve entirely neglected to comment on.
It’s interesting to see that even after writing three times as much as I intended (2,000 words per blog entry is not a pace I intend to keep up) the major criticism is about what I left out. Now, I’m new to blogging, but I was under the impression that the technology was meant to facilitate comment and discussion without having to write – or read – a thesis.
I apologize if you feel I’ve represented your opinions in caricature – from spending more time on your enormous site, I can see it’s obviously nuanced, and one quote doesn’t do you justice. Though if you think this song is about you, you are mistaken. Hence the 18 other non-Rosen links.
To start at the finish, your acerbic final comment about hype, I find it more than a little hypocritical that you accuse me of dining out on the subject. More so my day-job employer, the CBC, which is regularly bludgeoned with criticism of ignoring alternative voices. Painting me and/or the Corp. with the same big media brush as your 99 nameless journalists is, to use your thrice-repeated word, cheap.
Ditto your accusations of confused flip-flopping. To establish relevancy, I gave examples of how the technology can work – as background information, not self-contradiction. Perhaps you’d prefer something more one-sided and dismissive?
Like you, I think citizen journalism is important, and can coexist with traditional media – but I’m trying to understand the nature of that relationship. Those are the “sides” you pretend not to recognize, despite concluding long ago that at least one facet of this fight is over.
As for great expectations: I’m calling out comments like “citizens will produce 50 percent of the news peer-to-peer” and your own “more is up for grabs than has ever been up for grabs”. Asking me to prove that someone said the movement is a big deal is disingenuous and deflective. And I said “end of the reign of traditional journalism”, not “the end of traditional journalism.” Your own word was “monopoly” – I don’t think we are in disagreement here, so we don’t need to send straw men to fight each other.
The title wasn’t an accident, thanks. I thought an allusion to the famous fight for publishing dominance, and its cost, was fitting enough (if cutesy) to warrant the pun. I don’t suppose I can call you Rosebud?
If you or the world is actually interested in my “disappointments and delusions”, you can bet it’ll become a future blog entry – though I suspect neither of us would accept them as proof of any larger trend. But thanks for telling a blogger what he should write about – it validates my skepticism.
ANYHOW…
You’ve missed or ignored the trend that inspired me to write the piece in the first place, and takes up the last 800 words of my cheap, flip piece.
That trend – the one that most interests me professionally and privately – is the growing call for major media, including public broadcasters, to act as facilitators of citizen journalism.
The unanswered question is this: why does citizen journalism need big media?
Before you start, I already gave the names and links. Geist, Doctorow, Thompson and others call upon CBC to embrace it, and forge a new symbiotic relationship. But why?
- To let the audience decide what’s important, as Thompson posits? For every legit story the mainstream media misses, there are a dozen lowest-common-denominator stories that bloggers bring to the fore in a sort of self-referential circle jerk.
- To lend the citizenry resources, as a Public Good, as Doctorow suggests? It would seem to me that new technologies have freed citizens from needing this sort of charity.
- To manufacture relevancy for the CBC, as Geist offers? Seems like a sad basis for a relationship.
The examples of citizen/media collaboration I’ve seen so far have either been not very good, or not very popular. I’m hoping it can work, but I’ve yet to see it.
I’m not dismissing citizen journalism – it already exists as a very interesting stratum, alongside traditional journalism. I’m grateful for being able to poke around with both.
But I’d really like to hear your thoughts on why and how the two beasts can work together. I want to believe….
—————-
(OT: It’s too bad you abandoned The Teardrop. As a basketball fan I suspect we’d have gotten off to a better start there. As a baller, I agree that most hoops writing sucks. And I enjoyed Mark Jackson’s single season here in Toronto.)
This is 50 percent clearer, so thanks.
A few replies:
Yes, I think my views are represented in caricature. I don’t have “endless gung-ho enthusiasm for this new people power.” I have a limited enthusiasm.
In my view if you are going to charge people with delusions of grandeur you should say who they are and point to what they said that gave you that impression. I didn’t assume you were talking about me; I didn’t know who was included. Does Corey Doctorow have delusions of grandeur? Where?
If the both sides are traditional media and citizens media are you trying to call out the delusions of grandeur in the “old” news industry? Which ones? Where the names of the deluded ones? Why can’t I have them?
I don’t have any advice for what you should write about, and I don’t have any advice for the CBC. Others may have, but I haven’t called on the CBC (or for that matter CBS) to “do” citizen journalism. And I haven’t said that if the CBC did that, the result would be “peer to peer.”
My experience would suggest that anything a major television network does like that would be phonied up– big time.
Large organizations like the major news providers in the US have no experience with research and development. They get overly excited and then grow sour on new ideas prematurely. (A cycle to which hype is basic.) They have very little patience with the trial and error of experiment. They’re aren’t organized to listen to younger people who might know more about making something work on the Web. I don’t see them as ideal sites for proving that citizen journalism can work. It’s not their fault. They were invented for a different kind of work.
It;s not impossible for it to work inside the CBC, or the BBC, or Minnesota Public Radio, but I think most of the innovation, if it ever comes, will come from spaces well outside the traditional news organizations.
Thanks, now I think we’re getting somewhere.
I particularly appreciated your thoughts on the potential relationship between big media/public broadcasting and participatory journalism, even if the answer is “I don’t know” (a completely valid response, and the predominant one. Anyone else have thoughts on this?)
That aside, you’ve made it clear that you want me to demonstrate the “delusions of grandeur on both sides”, which I’ll do. It’s not the thing I’m most interested in, and I’m not convinced you sincerely doubt there are zealots in both the big media and citizen journalism camps. But I started and ended the piece with it, so I guess I better “own it.” My own journalism prof would have demanded the same.
I don’t pretend that any of these links are representative of the movement, or even the sum total of the authors’ opinions. Nonetheless, they are out there, I stumbled upon them, and they made me say, “wait a minute…” (Some of them I found through your own site.)
Delusional bloggers:
- kpaul mallasch’s Declaration of Independence:
“When in the course of journalism it becomes necessary to dissolve the weak bonds that have held the citizens to large media corporations, and for them to band together to create their own media empires, a decent respect to the blogs of the world requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separate.”
- From the 2nd International Citizen Reporters’ Forum (Ohmynews):
“But nothing is valid without the vision of ordinary citizen reporters who add manifold points of view, the diversity that new journalism needs.”
(It’s about partnerships, but c’mon, nothing?)
- I already mentioned EPIC 2014, which can be written off as an entertainment, thought apparently many are impressed by its “fantastic perception looking forward.” Predictions of the demise of traditional media are greatly exaggerated.
- A few numbers caught my attention also:
Thirty-four per cent of bloggers consider their blog to be a form of journalism, yet barely half of bloggers cite original sources or verify facts.
(It isn’t clear from the document what the overlap is.) More than half of bloggers think they should have the same rights as journalists. If there are at least 15 million blogs with 75,000 new ones created daily, that’s a lot of people who consider themselves journalists. I think the definition is becoming a little liberal.
Delusional big media:
- Samuel Freedman on CBC’s Public Eye:
“I despair over the movement’s current cachet. However wrapped in idealism, citizen journalism forms part of a larger attempt to degrade, even to disenfranchise journalism as practiced by trained professionals.”
- Plain Dealer columnist Dick Feagler’s ultra dismissive Facts a hassle? Blog them away in just seconds
(His spoof of blogs includes proof that the world is flat, and that Lincoln shot himself. Column no longer freely available, but you can get it through a Google cache.)
- William Safire’s column stating that blogs are OK for opinion, but big media still has the monopoly on trustworthiness.
Is Cory Doctorow deluded? I think Cory is a genius, but I also think he vastly overstates the trends he observes. Such overstatements include the faults and biases of traditional media, the amount of sifting BS-detecting media consumers want to undertake, and the backseat facilitator role public broadcasters should take in the future. Makes for a provocative think piece, though.
Perhaps I should have dropped the words “endless gung-ho”, or at least put some space between them and your quote. (Last week, Dan Gillmor’s own words for Citizen Journalist advocates was “incurably optimistic“. Maybe that’s better.) But then I might have missed out on this dialogue, which has been instructive.
Back to the big-small collaboration, for a moment. CBC’s own Tony Burman has some thoughts on the subject. And he points to an interesting, potentially non-phony initiative from across the pond, BBC’s user-generated content experiment.
I’m not sure such collaborations will prove necessary or successful, but I’m all for experimentation. We’ll be watching.
Hi Paul, Dave here. After you said you have a blog I found this, as well as Todd Maffin’s pointer. I didn’t expect photos of puppies and requests for help with your family tree but nor did I know there would be such a serious, thoughtful essay, much less an ensuing flame war (of the highest calibre, of course).
For my two cents, I’m not sure where I stand on blogging as a news source. In light of the mainstream media’s disastrous (not hyperbole, I’m afraid) performance in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, I’m tempted to say amateurs couldn’t do any worse. But you mentioned responsibility and, while it may often be a token concept for big media (O’Reilly is reporting as obvious, undeniable fact that Iran is completely behind Hezbollah’s actions in Lebanon) at least it’s a concept at all.
Corrections run every day in newspapers and, while broadcasters are more loathe to air their dirty laundry, Dan Rather suffered mightily for getting it wrong (I know, I know, the blogosphere helped point out his error — and then proceeded to question whether he’s ever reported a story correctly in his life.)
I know the theory about bloggers checking and balancing each other until something like truth emerges but the fact is that, from blogs I’ve read, there is usually an understanding that what’s being said is opinion, or facts filtered through opinion, so what is there to apologize for if you get it wrong?
The New York Times had to eat some crow over its Iraq coverage, as did the Washington Post and Bob Woodward. Not enough, mind you, but sane people who read the media critically will have some sense that they were fed a bunch of crap. What’s the blogosphere equivalent?
When the next U.S. election comes, and the right-wing bloggers attack the Democractic candidate like a pack of killer bees with a new equivalent of swiftboat, and it becomes accepted wisdom, I have a hunch that it will be the mainstream media, not liberal bloggers, that will end up doing a “reality check” and debunk the lie.
My cynical side says that, a la Iraq, Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman and the like, that reality check will, however, come too late to change anyone’s mind and it will run at the bottom of page 9, next to an ad for hair transplants.
Keep it up, Paul
Dave
Thanks Dave – glad you dropped by! I just bought a digital camera, so expect the emphasis to shift to puppies very shortly
I find the conversation about errors and corrections an interesting one. Cory Doctorow’s article lays out the pro-online argument nicely, and makes some good points. The internet is probably the best thing to happen to fact checking in history. Of course, as you point out, it’s equally adept at keeping big media honest as self-correcting. Probably moreso – there’s much more incentive to correct Dan Rather than 1,000 blogger “opinions.”
Regarding the blogosphere equivalent of eating crow, it’s been argued that bloggers too suffer from deflated credibility, and given that this is the only currency they have, they work hard to protect it. I’m not sure I buy that – controversy is as much a boon online as a problem. And even if your blog goes belly up, it’s not quite the same as being fired from your newspaper job. Bloggers don’t have to worry that they’ll never work in this town again.
I’m not quite sure I understand that?
Then again it’s probably just me.
Very nice. Love this place!
Keep up the good work!