Citizen Journalism That Matters
August 8, 2007
10:15 Session: Citizen Journalism that Matters
Convened by Barbara Selvin
Notes written by Audrey Manring
Started with some basic definitional questions around citizen journalism:
What distinguishes talk radio from citizen journalism? Is citizen
journalism mostly just the “sounding off” of opinion?
Does the public understand—and value—the distinction between “straight”
news and opinion? Our own opinions were mixed on this.
Perhaps there’s a need to defend old-style newsroom values, if not
old-style newsrooms. How do we impress the importance of these on news
consumers, younger people especially?
Do people want the “truth”? And if so, where do they look for it?
One reading of the segmentation of the news/opinion marketplace (talk
radio, Jon Stewart, et al.) is that people are self-isolating into “truth
silos.” Does this pose a danger to society? Generally agreed that it does.
On the other hand, open technologies make contributing to/participating in
news-making more accessible to wider range of people, including
“non-professionals.” Opens up opportunities for citizen journalists.
Where is citizen journalism important?
*In underserved communities
*To fill in the gaps on issues that aren’t adequately covered by MSM
Consensus emerged that citizen journalism is an overly broad term. Lots of
levels and types of involvement; important to distinguish among them to
better understand the phenomenon of cj and figure out where it
complements/overlaps with/perhaps supplants traditional MSM.
We came up with a preliminary list of types of cjs:
*Opinion bloggers
*Hyper-local sites (geographically based or “local” by field of interest)
*Participatory journalism (e.g., citizen fact-checking, crowdsourcing)
*In-depth reporting by individuals outside of corporate news organizations
Corporate media is in fact engaging with/encouraging a degree of citizen
journalism, mostly in the form of crowdsourcing. Gannett doing this, e.g.
Crowdsourcing has (at least) two flavors:
-Investigative reporting that emerges from the grassroots (e.g., Jeff
Gannon’s “outing” by members of Daily Kos, who subsequently formed
ePluribus Media, a sophisticated citizen journalism site).
-MSM reporters asking for tips/info on a particular topic (e.g., Gannett’s
eliciting of sewer bill info via crowdsourcing led to exposure of
corruption). Not necessarily different than traditional sourcing, but
faster: get info all at once rather than sequentially; burden of time
shifted away from sourcing to sorting.
Of course, crowdsourcing has dangers, e.g.:
-conflating small numbers into a trend
-the huge volume of info overwhelms, adds to workload. Does better story
result?
How can we know whether citizen journalism (or any journalism for that
matter) is making a difference? Should we be measuring the quality of
journalism by impact on people’s lives?
Four levels of impact:
*Changes knowledge of reader
*Changes opinion/thinking
*Changes behavior
*Causes reader to seek to influence others
Point was raised that not every story should move reader through all four
levels of impact. Appropriate for some stories/topics, but not all.
There is a software tool available for measuring the impact of journalism.
Called NetPromoter (??)
Are sites putting these evaluation tools up? Might there be foundation
funding for evaluating the impact of (citizen) journalism or developing
tools to measure impact?
How do we educate young people to appropriate evaluate reliability and
quality of media?
Stonybrook’s brand-new journalism program is offering a news literacy
course for general student population. Looking at issues of bias,
sourcing, objectivity, assertion, etc. Dual purpose of journalism program
is to train journalists AND to train future news consumers.
After-conference comments
I think the expression “citizen journalism” is often too open to interpretation to be very useful. The breakdown of types is a good move.
Another problem is that the phrase “citizen journalism” implies a false dichotomy. The distinction between one group and another has nothing to do with citizenship.