{"id":2750,"date":"2007-08-10T15:47:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-10T15:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/dc\/jtm-dc-reports-citizen-journalism-that-matters\/"},"modified":"2019-11-13T03:02:56","modified_gmt":"2019-11-13T03:02:56","slug":"jtm-dc-reports-citizen-journalism-that-matters","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/dc\/jtm-dc-reports-citizen-journalism-that-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Jtm-dc-reports-citizen-journalism-that-matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Citizen Journalism That Matters<\/h2>\n

August 8, 2007
\n10:15 Session: Citizen Journalism that Matters
\nConvened by Barbara Selvin
\nNotes written by Audrey Manring<\/p>\n

Started with some basic definitional questions around citizen journalism:<\/p>\n

What distinguishes talk radio from citizen journalism? Is citizen
\njournalism mostly just the \u201csounding off\u201d of opinion?<\/p>\n

Does the public understand\u2014and value\u2014the distinction between \u201cstraight\u201d
\nnews and opinion? Our own opinions were mixed on this.<\/p>\n

Perhaps there\u2019s a need to defend old-style newsroom values, if not
\nold-style newsrooms. How do we impress the importance of these on news
\nconsumers, younger people especially?<\/p>\n

Do people want the \u201ctruth\u201d? And if so, where do they look for it?<\/p>\n

One reading of the segmentation of the news\/opinion marketplace (talk
\nradio, Jon Stewart, et al.) is that people are self-isolating into \u201ctruth
\nsilos.\u201d Does this pose a danger to society? Generally agreed that it does.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, open technologies make contributing to\/participating in
\nnews-making more accessible to wider range of people, including
\n\u201cnon-professionals.\u201d Opens up opportunities for citizen journalists.<\/p>\n

Where is citizen journalism important?
\n*In underserved communities
\n*To fill in the gaps on issues that aren\u2019t adequately covered by MSM<\/p>\n

Consensus emerged that citizen journalism is an overly broad term. Lots of
\nlevels and types of involvement; important to distinguish among them to
\nbetter understand the phenomenon of cj and figure out where it
\ncomplements\/overlaps with\/perhaps supplants traditional MSM.<\/p>\n

We came up with a preliminary list of types of cjs:
\n*Opinion bloggers
\n*Hyper-local sites (geographically based or \u201clocal\u201d by field of interest)
\n*Participatory journalism (e.g., citizen fact-checking, crowdsourcing)
\n*In-depth reporting by individuals outside of corporate news organizations<\/p>\n

Corporate media is in fact engaging with\/encouraging a degree of citizen
\njournalism, mostly in the form of crowdsourcing. Gannett doing this, e.g.<\/p>\n

Crowdsourcing has (at least) two flavors:
\n-Investigative reporting that emerges from the grassroots (e.g., Jeff
\nGannon\u2019s \u201couting\u201d by members of Daily Kos, who subsequently formed
\nePluribus Media, a sophisticated citizen journalism site).
\n-MSM reporters asking for tips\/info on a particular topic (e.g., Gannett\u2019s
\neliciting of sewer bill info via crowdsourcing led to exposure of
\ncorruption). Not necessarily different than traditional sourcing, but
\nfaster: get info all at once rather than sequentially; burden of time
\nshifted away from sourcing to sorting.<\/p>\n

Of course, crowdsourcing has dangers, e.g.:
\n-conflating small numbers into a trend
\n-the huge volume of info overwhelms, adds to workload. Does better story
\nresult?<\/p>\n

How can we know whether citizen journalism (or any journalism for that
\nmatter) is making a difference? Should we be measuring the quality of
\njournalism by impact on people\u2019s lives?<\/p>\n

Four levels of impact:
\n*Changes knowledge of reader
\n*Changes opinion\/thinking
\n*Changes behavior
\n*Causes reader to seek to influence others<\/p>\n

Point was raised that not every story should move reader through all four
\nlevels of impact. Appropriate for some stories\/topics, but not all.<\/p>\n

There is a software tool available for measuring the impact of journalism.
\nCalled NetPromoter (??)<\/p>\n

Are sites putting these evaluation tools up? Might there be foundation
\nfunding for evaluating the impact of (citizen) journalism or developing
\ntools to measure impact?<\/p>\n

How do we educate young people to appropriate evaluate reliability and
\nquality of media?<\/p>\n

Stonybrook\u2019s brand-new journalism program is offering a news literacy
\ncourse for general student population. Looking at issues of bias,
\nsourcing, objectivity, assertion, etc. Dual purpose of journalism program
\nis to train journalists AND to train future news consumers.<\/p>\n

After-conference comments<\/p>\n

I think the expression “citizen journalism” is often too open to interpretation to be very useful. The breakdown of types is a good move.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201csounding off\u201d of opinion? Does the public understand\u2014and value\u2014the distinction between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2750","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/dc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/dc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/dc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/dc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/dc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2750"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/dc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2804,"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/dc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2750\/revisions\/2804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalismthatmatters.org\/dc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}