Archive for the ‘Citizen Journalism’ Category

A couple of years ago, we were getting bombarded with stories about “citizen journalism,” this notion that individuals with cell phone cameras and wireless Internet  were destined to replace professional journalists. It seemed silly to me, because I actually understand what reporters do, and it’s a lot more than just take pictures and fire off emails about overheard conversations.

The Guardian, which has done a better job of covering the transition of journalism than almost anyone, has an excellent article on the importance of professional journalists. One particular insight came from George Brock, head of Journalism at the City University of London:

But the facts of news consumption on the web tell us clearly that filtering is exactly what people tend to prefer when they have the choice. Filtering used in the old days to be known as ‘editing’. If it’s done right, it should be for the benefit and protection of the viewer or reader. It should create trust.

Journalism is drudgery and hard work. It takes many long hours and costs a lot of money. A quality news organization makes thousands of decisions each day about what’s important, what’s trivia, what’s credible and what’s irrelevant. Every reporter hates the editor who bombards him with questions about whether this source is credible, whether that fact is correct, and why this point is emphasized ahead of that one. Editors keep reporters honest and ensure that their stories are fair and complete. But there’s no such filter on “citizen journalists,” which explains why so many myths live on for years after they’ve been discredited.

To be sure, they don’t make these decisions perfectly. But competition among news organizations ensures that we’re no longer at the mercy of one or two media outlets. If the New York Times misses an important story, a competitor will report it. We’ll get it from the Washington Post, Politico, Slate or someone. But in most cases, we’ll get it from the pros.  And we’re all better off as a result.

I don’t do causes, but because of www.overcoffeemedia.com’s focus on media, I cannot avoid encouraging solidarity with the people in Iran who are seeking to communicate with each other and the world about what is happening in their country.

We must never forget that open communication within a society always supports freedom in the long run, whereas suppression serves tyranny. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians are protesting peacefully to demand that their votes be properly counted. In response, the government has shut down foreign reporting and sought to block access to networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. CNN Story.

There is, of course, precious little we can do. But one step I am taking is changing my time zone on Twitter and other social networks to GMT+03:30 (to match the Tehran time zone). What’s the point? One way the Iranian government hackers are seeking to block Iranians’ communications via Twitter, Facebook and other social networks is by searching for users that appear to be inside of Iran, and the time zone is a major tool they are using.

Do I think it will help? Not really, but some smart people believe that doing so may help provide “cover” for Iranians using the Internet to communicate with each other and to smuggle accounts, photos and videos to the world. If nothing else, I’ll be letting them know they have one more friend. Think of it as an online equivalent to the wonderful scene from the movie, V for Vendetta, when the masses don masks to make the hero impossible to identify.

Finally, there is one other step we can take on Twitter. When you see a credible tweet pointing to an information feed from Iran, consider retweeting it. Yes, I know it’ll use bandwidth and annoy some people. And of course, it could result in some of my own Internet communications being blocked for a while. But hopefully it’s just for a few days, and it just might help keep the information flowing.

Citizen Journalism has never excited me, and MySpace seems to be fading as a business environment (though new leadership could change that). Nevertheless, this bears watching. MySpace launching citizen journalism site

At first it sounded like a bad joke, but Senator Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., is serious. He proposed a bill that would allow newspapers to choose tax-exempt status, similar to that for public TV and radio stations. Advertising and subscription revenue would be untaxed, and readers could make tax-deductible contributions.

I didn’t really see this coming and don’t know what to make of it just yet. But I’ve been harping for more than a year now on the need to find a business model that will ensure the future of quality journalism, so I welcome this entry into the “marketplace of ideas.”

Meanwhile, the rate of bad news from our dailies is just accelerating. As noted yesterday, Gannett (which publishes 85 dailies) is asking most employees to give up a week’s pay — the second time this year they’ve gone to that well.  In Michigan, readers in Flint, Saginaw, Bay City and Ann Arbor have announced they’re no longer printing daily. (Ann Arbor is going to twice a week; the others will publish three days a week.)

The NY Times reports that all 272 employees at the Ann Arbor News are being laid off and invited to apply for jobs at one of two new corporations — annarbor.com and a printing company. The News will have far less original reporting and rely on reader contributions for content — the very thing I’ve been dreading. Our democracy doesn’t work very well without trained, supervised journalists.

Maybe the worst news for me — with a personal touch — is that the Michigan newspapers are part of Advance publications, owned by the Newhouse family. (I started my career with The Birmingham News, also a Newhouse paper.)  Newhouse has long been one of the most stable media companies, and one that tended to leave the newsrooms alone.

I try to keep Over Coffee non-personal, but I have to confess that the network’s obsession funneling foolishness from YouTube and other social network sites has become annoying. Newscasts are constantly interrupted for segments from an “Internet reporter” who, more often than not, just offers a breathless commercial for some “cool site.”

Hello CNN … the “cool sites” days ended more than a decade ago. People don’t care about a site because it’s novel or impressive any more. They go places for information and transactions.

The idea of taking questions from YouTube is beyond the pale even for CNN. We’ve had the ability for individuals to submit questions for a couple hundred years or so. If we just can’t live without seeing Billy Bubba say “Whatcha gonna do about Social Security,” we can have the local CNN affiliate go out and do a stand-up, or maybe let him stand up in the studio audience. There’s just nothing new here. No added value. No substance.

CNN is my favorite of the news networks, but they’ve gotten so trendy and self-conscious I find myself switching more and more to MSNBC.

OK, end of rant.

This plays into my ongoing skepticism regarding the viability of amateur journalism sites. By itself it doesn’t mean much, but it’s a straw in the wind.

Citizen journalism site to shut down

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet WriterThu Jul 12, 4:43 PM ET

A news site that has allowed its users to write and submit their own articles is shutting down, citing unspecified “business issues.”

Backfence Inc. had “hyperlocal” sites serving 13 communities in the Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Chicago areas. Residents were allowed to write on any topic, including event announcements and neighborhood traffic congestion, without the meddling of editors.

The idea was to get readers and viewers more involved in news production with the help of the Internet, camera phones and other technologies.

“We hope we have provided you with a valuable local forum,” Backfence told its readers. “Unfortunately, business issues are forcing us to close our doors and shut down the site.”

Backfence never drew much traffic. Its 13 operations collectively haven’t received enough visitors in a month to reach the threshold needed for comScore Media Metrix to properly measure. Normally, comScore needs at least 50,000 to 100,000 visitors.

Mark Potts, the site’s co-founder, refused to comment on the reasons behind the closure, saying they are proprietary. He acknowledged the company wasn’t successful, but said people shouldn’t dismiss the concept of citizen journalism.

“Along with our investors, we remain very enthusiastic about the potential for user-generated hyperlocal information and citizen journalism,” Potts wrote in an e-mail. “Backfence was a pioneer in that area.”

Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor, said others can now learn from Backfence’s failure.

“The first attempt, if it has some good ideas in it and some dubious ones are exposed, will make future projects easier and raise our chances for success,” Rosen said. “Backfence may have succeeded brilliantly in evolutionary terms.”

Many traditional media outlets along with standalone startups have been pushing citizen journalism as a way to expand their offerings, particularly for community developments that may appeal to a relatively small number of people but are very important to those few affected.

Last year, Backfence acquired another pioneer in citizen journalism, the San Francisco area’s Bayosphere, which was created by former newspaper columnist Dan Gillmor.

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Is it just my failure to pay attention, or has the “participatory journalism” hype hit an air pocket? Just a couple of months ago, it seemed impossible to escape the hysterical prophecies that amateur bloggers would become the eyes and ears to our entire society, calling into question the value of professional journalists in mainstream news organizations.

At its peak, it felt a little like a blow-off to me — one of those occasional points where we seem to overload on a theme to the point where we all suddenly lose interest. Not unlike a night of booze-induced puking that leads to a period of abstinence. We’ve seen a bunch of blow-offs lately. The Da Vinci Code mania that disappeared overnight once the movie came out. The American Idol ravings that became muted by a mediocre lineup and, I suspect, some hype fatigue. Don’t be surprised if even the obsession with our drunken pop princesses (Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Nicole and the like) vaporizes soon. And unless I miss my guess, the fanatics will get their iPhones and disappear from the sidewalk lines and we’ll hear little about Steve Jobs’ new gadget. Sure, there will be a lot of reviews, but the mystery will be gone. And let’s face it — there’s not much left to feed the frenzy.

Even though things are quiet on the blogging/YouTube front, I’m nowhere near ready to pronounce the citizen journalism thing dead. People are still writing blogs and shooting amateur videos, but the mainstream media are paying less attention. (Side point: What does it say that the amateur news blogs depend upon the mainstream media to ensure their role?) Another factor is that we haven’t had much in the way of YouTube scoops like the Michael Richards video. Or maybe we have but don’t know it because the mainstream media have quit following the amateurs around. The networks ran a lot of amateur video from April’s Virginia Tech massacre, but it didn’t really show much. If it had been shot by their own cameras, they wouldn’t have even aired it.

As always, I have to return to my drumbeat that only professional journalists in real news organizations have the time, the resources, the money and the expertise to do the kind of reporting that makes our democracy function effectively. This week’s incredible Washington Post series on Vice President Cheney shows the kind of reporting that can’t be compared to a lucky cell phone video shot. The same is true of  Sy Hersh article in last week’s New Yorker about the general who investigated the Abu Ghraib outrages.

Sometimes the more junk food you eat, the more you want the real thing. And I’ve been really hungry lately.

For a while, I’ve been returning to the theme that media must find an economic model that allows major news organizations to spend the time and money pursuing major stories that “citizen journalists” lack the time, money and expertise to report.

The New York Times brought us an excellent piece of “big bucks” reporting over the weekend, when reporters David Barboza and Alexei Barrioneuvo interviewed Chinese scrap dealers who have been selling leftover melamine to producers of grains for pet and livestock feeds. While melamine has no nutritional value, it fools the current tests into thinking it’s protien, allowing the companies to pass off possibly fatal wheat gluten laced with a scrap chemical. Further, the story made it clear that this stuff is going into feeds for farm animals, putting it in the human food chain.

Realistically, I don’t know of many blogs who would send a reporter to Zhangqiu, China to interview scrap dealers. Those who are celebrating the decline of the old media need to ask themselves who’s going to fill that gap. If the answer is independent bloggers and college students taking cell phone videos and posting them on YouTube, they need to find a different brand of whatever they’re smoking.

The widespread use of videos taken by students at Virginia Tech has prompted a new round of discussion about “citizen journalism,” but in this case, it seems more focused on the “eyes and ears” function than the notion of relying on untrained individuals to gather, evalute and report news. Used this way, it is a clear benefit, but it’s not much different from the old tiplines that newspapers and TV stations have used for years. Realistically, the videos themselves didn’t add much to the coverage. We heard shots and saw cops running around with guns, but we already knew shots had been fired, and we knew the place was swarming with SWAT teams. It’s worthwhile, but not groundbreaking.

On the broader front, it’s interesting to see that USA Today is going to start using content from The Politico, an online startup staffed with journalists from mainstream media like Time, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press. Don’t confuse this with citizen journalism. It’s a well-funded effort, and a very good one. Sometimes I think a news organization built around its online product has advantages over those growing out of traditional newspapers and TV stations. It isn’t weighed down by old ideas, heavy investments in inefficient delivery systems and staffs built for a different time. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times plans to cut up to 70 newsroom jobs, reducing the newsroom staff to 850. Before the newspaper was purchased by Tribune in 2000, it had 1,200 in its news operations.

I’ve put off posting on the Virginia Tech shootings for several reasons. I didn’t see any point in saying the same things everybody else is already pointing out, and I wanted to let this sink in for a few days to let my emotions run their course and allow a more objective assessment. So with that perspective, I have four loosely connected observations, in no particular order.

1. There are times when objectivity has to take a back seat, and this is one of those times. There is simply no way to have a credible detachment from these events. You can’t report that while the person — “reportedly” a reclusive student named Seung-Hui Cho — did thus and such, which some individuals claim represented a homicidal rampage. It was a homicidal rampage.
2. Sensitivity to the survivors and families was mixed. It was good to see some broadcast reporters demonstrating basic human sympathy and sensitivity — one even holding the hand of a family members as she conducted the interview. An anchor offered his prayers. There are those who would say this is inappropriate, but reporters are people too. (Do you really want to trust the important job of reporting the news to someone who is so cold and unfeeling as to pretend this was just another story?) On the other hand, the crush of reporters was intrusive, and they trampled on the feelings of grief-stricken survivors and family. The New York Times reported that some were passing out “media go home” flyers, and the TV reporters refused to divert their cameras when asked by the individuals. They were within their rights to keep the cameras going, because it was taking place outdoors in a public place. But human decency would have called for them to grant these poor people a little respite. I’ve been in the shoes of both the reporters and the survivors. As a newspaper reporter, I once was told to call the family of a murder victim on the day of the killing. I tried, but it was immediately clear that bothering them was simply wrong. I was told to go to the house and knock on the door, and I refused at risk of being fired. There are times when you have to be human first and reporter second.
3. The facts were less slippery than usual in such situations. Fast-breaking stories like this normally produce wildly inaccurate numbers, but I saw less of this than I would have expected. Credit the college officials and police for being careful and keeping things under control. They’re under fire for not closing down the campus early, but that’s a different issue. As best I could tell, they did a good job of keeping the press informed under very difficult circumstances.
4. The videos presented a dilemma across the board. The videos mailed by Cho to NBC were chilling, to say the least. They showed just how deranged he was. Did showing the videos serve a public purpose (perhaps helping educate us a bit about such mental illness) or did they just pander to our voyeurism? My perception of this is skewed by a personal experience I had when we lost a family member to an airplane crash and the local TV stations continued for weeks to show the wreckage. Then they’d drag out the tape on the six-month and one-year anniversaries just to make sure we didn’t forget it. For the family members (including his two children), this was devastating, forcing us to relive the disaster again and again. So I tilt toward a “keep it under wraps” bias. Perhaps the better thing would be to place it on a web site where people who wanted to see it could access it. Other networks would still be able to get it and air it, of course, but it would have dialed it back significantly. (As it turned out, many of them stopped or scaled back their use of the videos in response to criticism.)