Citizen journalism
Encyclopedia
Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal 2003 report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information. Authors Bowman and Willis say: "The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires."
Citizen journalism should not be confused with community journalism
or civic journalism
, which are practiced by professional journalists, or collaborative journalism
, which is practiced by professional and non-professional journalists working together. Citizen journalism is a specific form of citizen media
as well as user generated content.
Mark Glaser, a freelance journalist who frequently writes on new media
issues, said in 2006:
In What is Participatory Journalism?, J. D. Lasica classifies media for citizen journalism into the following types:
New media theorist Terry Flew
states that there are three elements "critical to the rise of citizen journalism and citizen media": open publishing, collaborative editing and distributed content.
. Those journalists became part of the public, or civic, journalism movement, a countermeasure against the eroding trust in the news media and widespread public disillusionment with politics and civic affairs.
Initially, discussions of public journalism focused on promoting journalism that was "for the people" by changing the way professional reporters did their work. According to Leonard Witt, however, early public journalism efforts were, "often part of 'special projects' that were expensive, time-consuming and episodic. Too often these projects dealt with an issue and moved on. Professional journalists were driving the discussion. They would say, "Let's do a story on welfare-to-work (or the environment, or traffic problems, or the economy)," and then they would recruit a cross-section of citizens and chronicle their points of view. Since not all reporters and editors bought into this form of public journalism, and some outright opposed it, reaching out to the people from the newsroom was never an easy task." By 2003, in fact, the movement seemed to be petering out, with the Pew Center for Civic Journalism closing its doors.
With today’s technology the citizen journalist movement has found new life as the average person can capture news and distribute it globally. As Yochai Benkler
has noted, “the capacity to make meaning – to encode and decode humanly meaningful statements – and the capacity to communicate one’s meaning around the world, are held by, or readily available to, at least many hundreds of millions of users around the globe.” Professor Mary-Rose Papandrea, a constitutional law professor at Boston College, notes in her article, Citizen Journalism and the Reporter’s Privilege, that:
was by blocking the streets. And then, the scant 60 seconds of coverage would show them being carted off by the police, but without any context to explain why they were protesting. They knew they had to create an alternative media model. Since then, the Indymedia movement has experienced exponential growth, and IMCs have been created in over 200 cities all over the world.
Simultaneously, journalism that was "by the people" began to flourish, enabled by emerging internet and networking technologies, such as weblogs
, chat rooms, message boards, wiki
s and mobile computing
. A relatively new development is the use of convergent polls, allowing editorials and opinions to be submitted and voted on. Overtime, the poll converges on the most broadly accepted editorials and opinions. In South Korea, OhmyNews
became popular and commercially successful with the motto, "Every Citizen is a Reporter." Founded by Oh Yeon-ho
on February 22, 2000, it has a staff of some 40-plus traditional reporters and editors who write about 20% of its content, with the rest coming from other freelance contributors who are mostly ordinary citizens. OhmyNews now has an estimated 50,000 contributors, and has been credited with transforming South Korea's conservative political environment.
In 2001, ThemeParkInsider.com became the first online publication to win a major journalism award for a feature that was reported and written entirely by readers, earning an Online Journalism Award from the Online News Association
and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism for its "Accident Watch" section, where readers tracked injury accidents at theme parks and shared accident prevention tips.
During the 2004 U.S. presidential election
, both the Democratic and Republican parties issued press credentials to citizen bloggers covering the convention, marking a new level of influence and credibility for nontraditional journalists. Some bloggers also began watchdogging the work of conventional journalists, monitoring their work for biases and inaccuracy.
A recent trend in citizen journalism has been the emergence of what blogger Jeff Jarvis
terms hyperlocal journalism, as online news sites invite contributions from local residents of their subscription areas, who often report on topics that conventional newspapers tend to ignore. "We are the traditional journalism model turned upside down," explains Mary Lou Fulton, the publisher of the Northwest Voice in Bakersfield, California. "Instead of being the gatekeeper, telling people that what's important to them 'isn't news,' we're just opening up the gates and letting people come on in. We are a better community newspaper for having thousands of readers who serve as the eyes and ears for the Voice, rather than having everything filtered through the views of a small group of reporters and editors."
protests were also influenced by live interactive media coverage through citizen journalists such as Tim Pool
, citizen journalists "the people formerly known as the audience," 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. ... The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable."
Abraham Zapruder
, who filmed the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy with a home-movie camera, is sometimes presented as an ancestor of all citizen journalists.
Public Journalism is now being explored via new media such as the use of mobile phones. Mobile phones have the potential to transform reporting and places the power of reporting in the hands of the public. Mobile telephony provides low-cost options for people to set up news operations. One small organization providing mobile news
and exploring public journalism is Jasmine News in Sri Lanka
.
According to Mark Glaser, during 9/11 many eyewitness accounts of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center came from citizen journalists. Images and stories from citizen journalists close to the World Trade Center offered content that played a major role in the story.
In 2004, when the 9.1-magnitude underwater earthquake caused a huge tsunami
in Banda Aceh Indonesia, news footage from many people who experienced the tsunami was widely broadcast.
During the 2009 Iranian election protests
the microblog service Twitter
played an important role, after foreign journalists had effectively been "barred from reporting".
, which have accused proponents of public journalism of abandoning the traditional goal of 'objectivity'
. Many traditional journalists view citizen journalism with some skepticism, believing that only trained journalists can understand the exactitude and ethics involved in reporting news. See, e.g., Nicholas Lemann
, Vincent Maher, and Tom Grubisich.
An academic paper by Vincent Maher, the head of the New Media Lab at Rhodes University, outlined several weaknesses in the claims made by citizen journalists, in terms of the "three deadly E's", referring to ethics
, economics
and epistemology. This paper has itself been criticized in the press and blogosphere.
An article in 2005 by Tom Grubisich reviewed ten new citizen journalism sites and found many of them lacking in quality and content. Grubisich followed up a year later with, "Potemkin Village Redux." He found that the best sites had improved editorially and were even nearing profitability, but only by not expensing editorial costs. Also according to the article, the sites with the weakest editorial content were able to aggressively expand because they had stronger financial resources.
Another article published on Pressthink examined Backfence, a citizen journalism site with initial three locations in the DC area, which reveals that the site has only attracted limited citizen contributions. The author concludes that, "in fact, clicking through Backfence's pages feels like frontier land -– remote, often lonely, zoned for people but not home to any. The site recently launched for Arlington, Virginia. However, without more settlers, Backfence may wind up creating more ghost towns."
David Simon
, a former Baltimore Sun reporter and writer/producer of the popular TV series, "The Wire
," criticized the concept of citizen journalism—claiming that unpaid bloggers who write as a hobby cannot replace trained, professional, seasoned journalists.
An editorial published by The Digital Journalist web magazine expressed a similar position, advocating to abolish the term "citizen journalist", and replacing it with "citizen news gatherer".
Edward Greenberg, a New York City litigator, notes higher vulnerability of unprofessional journalists in court compared to the professional ones:
The above does not mean that professional journalists are fully protected by shield laws. In the 1972 Branzburg v. Hayes
case the Supreme Court of the United States
invalidated the use of the First Amendment
as a defense for reporters summoned to testify before a grand jury
. In 2005, the reporter's privilege of Judith Miller
and Matthew Cooper
was rejected by the appellate court.
Others criticize the formulation of the term "citizen journalism" to describe the concept, as the word "citizen" has a conterminous relation to the nation-state. The fact that many millions of people are considered stateless and often without citizenship (such as refugees or immigrants without papers) limits the concept to those recognised only by governments. Additionally the global nature of many participatory media initiatives, such as the Independent Media Center
, makes talking of journalism in relation to a particular nation-state largely redundant as its production and dissemination do not recognise national boundaries. Some additional names given to the concept based on this analysis are grassroots media, people's media, or participatory media.
, former technology columnist with the San Jose Mercury News
, is one of the foremost proponents of citizen journalism, and founded a nonprofit, the Center for Citizen Media, to help promote it. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
's French-language television network has also organized a weekly public affairs program called, "5 sur 5", which has been organizing and promoting citizen-based journalism since 2001. On the program, viewers submit questions on a wide variety of topics, and they, accompanied by staff journalists, get to interview experts to obtain answers to their questions.
Jay Rosen
, a journalism professor at New York University, was one of public journalism's earliest proponents. From 1993 to 1997, he directed the Project on Public Life and the Press, funded by the Knight Foundation and housed at NYU. He also currently runs the PressThink weblog.
Citizen journalism should not be confused with community journalism
Community journalism
Community journalism is locally oriented, professional news coverage that typically focuses on city neighborhoods, individual suburbs or small towns, rather than metropolitan, state, national or world news....
or civic journalism
Civic Journalism
The civic journalism movement is, according to professor David K. Perry of the University of Alabama, an attempt to abandon the notion that journalists and their audiences are spectators in political and social processes. In its place, the civic journalism movement seeks to treat readers and...
, which are practiced by professional journalists, or collaborative journalism
Collaborative journalism
Collaborative journalism is a mode of journalism where multiple reporters or news organizations, without affiliation to a common parent organization, report on and contribute news items to a news story together...
, which is practiced by professional and non-professional journalists working together. Citizen journalism is a specific form of citizen media
Citizen media
The term citizen media refers to forms of content produced by private citizens who are otherwise not professional journalists. Citizen journalism, participatory media and democratic media are related principles.-Principles of citizen media:...
as well as user generated content.
Mark Glaser, a freelance journalist who frequently writes on new media
New media
New media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community...
issues, said in 2006:
The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others. For example, you might write about a city council meeting on your blog or in an online forum. Or you could fact-check a newspaper article from the mainstream media and point out factual errors or bias on your blog. Or you might snap a digital photo of a newsworthy event happening in your town and post it online. Or you might videotape a similar event and post it on a site such as YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
.
In What is Participatory Journalism?, J. D. Lasica classifies media for citizen journalism into the following types:
- Audience participation (such as user comments attached to news stories, personal blogs, photos or video footage captured from personal mobile cameras, or local news written by residents of a community)
- Independent news and information Websites (Consumer ReportsConsumer ReportsConsumer Reports is an American magazine published monthly by Consumers Union since 1936. It publishes reviews and comparisons of consumer products and services based on reporting and results from its in-house testing laboratory. It also publishes cleaning and general buying guides...
, the Drudge ReportDrudge ReportThe Drudge Report is a news aggregation website. Run by Matt Drudge with the help of Joseph Curl and Charles Hurt, the site consists mainly of links to stories from the United States and international mainstream media about politics, entertainment, and current events as well as links to many...
) - Full-fledged participatory news sites (NowPublicNowPublicNowPublic is a user-generated social news website. The company is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and was founded by Michael Tippett, Leonard Brody and Michael E. Meyers in 2005. On Sept. 2, 2009 the company was acquired by Clarity Digital Group, LLC, wholly owned by The Anschutz...
, OhmyNewsOhmyNewsOhmyNews is a South Korean online newspaper website with the motto "Every Citizen is a Reporter". It was founded by Oh Yeon Ho on February 22, 2000....
, DigitalJournal.comDigitalJournal.comDigitalJournal.com is an international news network where thousands of citizen reporters contribute from 140 countries around the world....
, Blottr.com, GroundReportGroundReportGroundReport is a global news platform that enables anyone to submit original news and opinion for publication to an international audience. With a mission to 'democratize the media,' GroundReport's contributors report from the scene of world events to add local, firsthand insight to international...
) - Collaborative and contributory media sites (SlashdotSlashdotSlashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
, Kuro5hinKuro5hinKuro5hin is a collaborative discussion website. Articles are created and submitted by Kuro5hin's users and submitted to queue for evaluation. Site members can vote for or against publishing an article and, once the article has reached a certain number of votes, it is then published to the site...
, NewsvineNewsvineNewsvine is a community-powered, collaborative journalism news website, owned by msnbc.com, which draws content from its users and syndicated content from mainstream sources such as The Associated Press...
) - Other kinds of "thin media." (mailing lists, email newsletters)
- Personal broadcasting sites (video broadcast sites such as KenRadioKenRadioKenRadio Broadcasting is an online talk radio station with its main focus on the latest technology news. Produced in Los Angeles and occasionally on location at big trade shows and other important events, Ken Rutkowski and Andy Abramson's audio and video shows cover media, technology, and...
).
New media theorist Terry Flew
Terry Flew
Terry Flew is an associate Professor of Media and Communication in the Creative Industries faculty at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He has authored the books Games: Technology, Industry, Culture and Understanding Global Media...
states that there are three elements "critical to the rise of citizen journalism and citizen media": open publishing, collaborative editing and distributed content.
History
The idea that average citizens can engage in the act of journalism has a long history in the United States. The modern citizen journalist movement emerged after journalists themselves began to question the predictability of their coverage of such events as the 1988 U.S. presidential electionUnited States presidential election, 1988
The United States presidential election of 1988 featured no incumbent president, as President Ronald Reagan was unable to seek re-election after serving the maximum two terms allowed by the Twenty-second Amendment. Reagan's Vice President, George H. W. Bush, won the Republican nomination, while the...
. Those journalists became part of the public, or civic, journalism movement, a countermeasure against the eroding trust in the news media and widespread public disillusionment with politics and civic affairs.
Initially, discussions of public journalism focused on promoting journalism that was "for the people" by changing the way professional reporters did their work. According to Leonard Witt, however, early public journalism efforts were, "often part of 'special projects' that were expensive, time-consuming and episodic. Too often these projects dealt with an issue and moved on. Professional journalists were driving the discussion. They would say, "Let's do a story on welfare-to-work (or the environment, or traffic problems, or the economy)," and then they would recruit a cross-section of citizens and chronicle their points of view. Since not all reporters and editors bought into this form of public journalism, and some outright opposed it, reaching out to the people from the newsroom was never an easy task." By 2003, in fact, the movement seemed to be petering out, with the Pew Center for Civic Journalism closing its doors.
With today’s technology the citizen journalist movement has found new life as the average person can capture news and distribute it globally. As Yochai Benkler
Yochai Benkler
Yochai Benkler is an Israeli-American professor of Law and author. Since 2007, he has been the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.- Biography :In 1984, Benkler...
has noted, “the capacity to make meaning – to encode and decode humanly meaningful statements – and the capacity to communicate one’s meaning around the world, are held by, or readily available to, at least many hundreds of millions of users around the globe.” Professor Mary-Rose Papandrea, a constitutional law professor at Boston College, notes in her article, Citizen Journalism and the Reporter’s Privilege, that:
[i]n many ways, the definition of journalist has now come full circle. When the First Amendment was adopted, “freedom of the press” referred quite literally to the freedom to publish using a printing press, rather than the freedom of organized entities engaged in the publishing business. The printers of 1775 did not exclusively publish newspapers; instead, in order to survive financially they dedicated most of their efforts printing materials for paying clients. The newspapers and pamphlets of the American Revolutionary era were predominantly partisan and became even more so through the turn of the century. They engaged in little newsgathering and instead were predominantly vehicles for opinion.
The passage of the term “journalism” into common usage in the 1830s occurred at roughly the same time that newspapers, using highspeed rotary steam presses, began mass circulation throughout the eastern United States. Using the printing press, newspapers could distribute exact copies to large numbers of readers at a low incremental cost. In addition, the rapidly increasing demand for advertising for brand- name products fueled the creation of publications subsidized in large part by advertising revenue. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the concept of the “press” morphed into a description of individuals and companies engaged in an often competitive commercial media enterprise.
Birth of Blogs and the Indymedia Movement
In 1999, activists in Seattle created a response to the WTO meeting being held there. These activists understood the only way they could get into the corporate mediaCorporate media
"Corporate media" is a term which refers to a system of mass media production, distribution, ownership, and funding which is dominated by corporations and their CEOs....
was by blocking the streets. And then, the scant 60 seconds of coverage would show them being carted off by the police, but without any context to explain why they were protesting. They knew they had to create an alternative media model. Since then, the Indymedia movement has experienced exponential growth, and IMCs have been created in over 200 cities all over the world.
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
, chat rooms, message boards, wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
s and mobile computing
Mobile computing
Mobile computing is a form of human–computer interaction by which a computer is expected to be transported during normal usage. Mobile computing has three aspects: mobile communication, mobile hardware, and mobile software...
. A relatively new development is the use of convergent polls, allowing editorials and opinions to be submitted and voted on. Overtime, the poll converges on the most broadly accepted editorials and opinions. In South Korea, OhmyNews
OhmyNews
OhmyNews is a South Korean online newspaper website with the motto "Every Citizen is a Reporter". It was founded by Oh Yeon Ho on February 22, 2000....
became popular and commercially successful with the motto, "Every Citizen is a Reporter." Founded by Oh Yeon-ho
Oh Yeon Ho
Oh Yeon Ho is the founder of "citizen journalism" in the Republic of Korea, and CEO of OhmyNews a new approach to cyber-journalism in which ordinary citizens can contribute to a major news organization through being at news events, filing reports, and having their work verified and edited by a...
on February 22, 2000, it has a staff of some 40-plus traditional reporters and editors who write about 20% of its content, with the rest coming from other freelance contributors who are mostly ordinary citizens. OhmyNews now has an estimated 50,000 contributors, and has been credited with transforming South Korea's conservative political environment.
In 2001, ThemeParkInsider.com became the first online publication to win a major journalism award for a feature that was reported and written entirely by readers, earning an Online Journalism Award from the Online News Association
Online News Association
The Online News Association , founded in 1999, is a 501 non-profit organization made up of more than 1,800 members. Its mission: Inspiring innovation and excellence among digital journalists to better serve the public....
and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism for its "Accident Watch" section, where readers tracked injury accidents at theme parks and shared accident prevention tips.
During the 2004 U.S. presidential election
United States presidential election, 2004
The United States presidential election of 2004 was the United States' 55th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 2, 2004. Republican Party candidate and incumbent President George W. Bush defeated Democratic Party candidate John Kerry, the then-junior U.S. Senator...
, both the Democratic and Republican parties issued press credentials to citizen bloggers covering the convention, marking a new level of influence and credibility for nontraditional journalists. Some bloggers also began watchdogging the work of conventional journalists, monitoring their work for biases and inaccuracy.
A recent trend in citizen journalism has been the emergence of what blogger Jeff Jarvis
Jeff Jarvis
Jeff Jarvis is an American journalist. Previously he was a television critic for TV Guide and People magazine, creator of Entertainment Weekly, Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News, and a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner.-Career:Until recently Jarvis was...
terms hyperlocal journalism, as online news sites invite contributions from local residents of their subscription areas, who often report on topics that conventional newspapers tend to ignore. "We are the traditional journalism model turned upside down," explains Mary Lou Fulton, the publisher of the Northwest Voice in Bakersfield, California. "Instead of being the gatekeeper, telling people that what's important to them 'isn't news,' we're just opening up the gates and letting people come on in. We are a better community newspaper for having thousands of readers who serve as the eyes and ears for the Voice, rather than having everything filtered through the views of a small group of reporters and editors."
Occupy
OccupyOccupy movement
The Occupy movement is an international protest movement which is primarily directed against economic and social inequality. The first Occupy protest to be widely covered was Occupy Wall Street in New York City, taking place on September 17, 2011...
protests were also influenced by live interactive media coverage through citizen journalists such as Tim Pool
Tim Pool
Timothy Pool is an American journalist from Chicago, Illinois. His unique 21-hour marathon reporting earned him fame during the Occupy Wall Street protests. Utilizing a unique style of first-hand reporting and insightful commentary, Pool's reputation spread quickly across social and mainstream media...
Who are citizen journalists?
According to Jay RosenJay Rosen
Jay Rosen is a media critic, a writer, and a professor of journalism at New York University.Rosen has been on the journalism faculty at New York University since 1986; from 1999 to 2005 he served as chair of the Department.He has been one of the earliest advocates and supporters of citizen...
, citizen journalists "the people formerly known as the audience," 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. ... The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable."
Abraham Zapruder
Abraham Zapruder
Abraham Zapruder was an American manufacturer of women's clothing. He was filming with a home-movie camera as U.S. President John F...
, who filmed the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy with a home-movie camera, is sometimes presented as an ancestor of all citizen journalists.
Public Journalism is now being explored via new media such as the use of mobile phones. Mobile phones have the potential to transform reporting and places the power of reporting in the hands of the public. Mobile telephony provides low-cost options for people to set up news operations. One small organization providing mobile news
Mobile news
- Mobile news delivery :Today, mobile news delivery can be done via SMS, by specialized applications, or using mobile versions of media websites. According to a recent market study across six countries , 16.9% of consumers access news and information via mobile devices, either via browser,...
and exploring public journalism is Jasmine News in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...
.
According to Mark Glaser, during 9/11 many eyewitness accounts of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center came from citizen journalists. Images and stories from citizen journalists close to the World Trade Center offered content that played a major role in the story.
In 2004, when the 9.1-magnitude underwater earthquake caused a huge tsunami
Tsunami
A tsunami is a series of water waves caused by the displacement of a large volume of a body of water, typically an ocean or a large lake...
in Banda Aceh Indonesia, news footage from many people who experienced the tsunami was widely broadcast.
During the 2009 Iranian election protests
2009 Iranian election protests
Protests following the 2009 Iranian presidential election against the disputed victory of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and in support of opposition candidates Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi occurred in major cities in Iran and around the world starting June 13, 2009...
the microblog service Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
played an important role, after foreign journalists had effectively been "barred from reporting".
Criticisms
Citizen journalists may be activists within the communities they write about. This has drawn some criticism from traditional media institutions such as The New York TimesThe New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, which have accused proponents of public journalism of abandoning the traditional goal of 'objectivity'
Objectivity (journalism)
Parent article: Journalism ethics and standardsObjectivity is a significant principle of journalistic professionalism. Journalistic objectivity can refer to fairness, disinterestedness, factuality, and nonpartisanship, but most often encompasses all of these qualities.- Definitions :In the context...
. Many traditional journalists view citizen journalism with some skepticism, believing that only trained journalists can understand the exactitude and ethics involved in reporting news. See, e.g., Nicholas Lemann
Nicholas Lemann
Nicholas Berthelot Lemann is dean and Henry R. Luce professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City.Lemann is from New Orleans and he graduated from Harvard University in 1976, but has never attended a school of journalism. He is a journalist, editor, and author...
, Vincent Maher, and Tom Grubisich.
An academic paper by Vincent Maher, the head of the New Media Lab at Rhodes University, outlined several weaknesses in the claims made by citizen journalists, in terms of the "three deadly E's", referring to ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...
, economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
and epistemology. This paper has itself been criticized in the press and blogosphere.
An article in 2005 by Tom Grubisich reviewed ten new citizen journalism sites and found many of them lacking in quality and content. Grubisich followed up a year later with, "Potemkin Village Redux." He found that the best sites had improved editorially and were even nearing profitability, but only by not expensing editorial costs. Also according to the article, the sites with the weakest editorial content were able to aggressively expand because they had stronger financial resources.
Another article published on Pressthink examined Backfence, a citizen journalism site with initial three locations in the DC area, which reveals that the site has only attracted limited citizen contributions. The author concludes that, "in fact, clicking through Backfence's pages feels like frontier land -– remote, often lonely, zoned for people but not home to any. The site recently launched for Arlington, Virginia. However, without more settlers, Backfence may wind up creating more ghost towns."
David Simon
David Simon
David Simon is an American author, journalist, and a writer/producer of television series. He worked for the Baltimore Sun City Desk for twelve years. He wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and co-wrote The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood with Ed Burns...
, a former Baltimore Sun reporter and writer/producer of the popular TV series, "The Wire
The WIRE
the WIRE is the student-run College radio station at the University of Oklahoma, broadcasting in a freeform format. The WIRE serves the University of Oklahoma and surrounding communities, and is staffed by student DJs. The WIRE broadcasts at 1710 kHz AM in Norman, Oklahoma...
," criticized the concept of citizen journalism—claiming that unpaid bloggers who write as a hobby cannot replace trained, professional, seasoned journalists.
An editorial published by The Digital Journalist web magazine expressed a similar position, advocating to abolish the term "citizen journalist", and replacing it with "citizen news gatherer".
Edward Greenberg, a New York City litigator, notes higher vulnerability of unprofessional journalists in court compared to the professional ones:
The above does not mean that professional journalists are fully protected by shield laws. In the 1972 Branzburg v. Hayes
Branzburg v. Hayes
Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665 , was a landmark United States Supreme Court decision invalidating the use of the First Amendment as a defense for reporters summoned to testify before a grand jury. The case was argued February 23, 1972 and decided June 29 of the same year. The reporter lost his...
case the Supreme Court of the United States
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
invalidated the use of the First Amendment
First Amendment to the United States Constitution
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...
as a defense for reporters summoned to testify before a grand jury
Grand jury
A grand jury is a type of jury that determines whether a criminal indictment will issue. Currently, only the United States retains grand juries, although some other common law jurisdictions formerly employed them, and most other jurisdictions employ some other type of preliminary hearing...
. In 2005, the reporter's privilege of Judith Miller
Judith Miller (journalist)
Judith Miller is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, formerly of the New York Times Washington bureau. Her coverage of Iraq's alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction program both before and after the 2003 invasion generated much controversy...
and Matthew Cooper
Matthew Cooper (American journalist)
Matthew Cooper is a former reporter for Time who, along with New York Times reporter Judith Miller was held in contempt of court and threatened with imprisonment for refusing to testify before the Grand Jury regarding the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation. He currently works as the managing...
was rejected by the appellate court.
Others criticize the formulation of the term "citizen journalism" to describe the concept, as the word "citizen" has a conterminous relation to the nation-state. The fact that many millions of people are considered stateless and often without citizenship (such as refugees or immigrants without papers) limits the concept to those recognised only by governments. Additionally the global nature of many participatory media initiatives, such as the Independent Media Center
Independent Media Center
The Independent Media Center is a global participatory network of journalists that report on political and social issues. It originated during the Seattle anti-WTO protests worldwide in 1999 and remains closely associated with the global justice movement, which criticizes neo-liberalism and its...
, makes talking of journalism in relation to a particular nation-state largely redundant as its production and dissemination do not recognise national boundaries. Some additional names given to the concept based on this analysis are grassroots media, people's media, or participatory media.
Proponents of citizen journalism
Dan GillmorDan Gillmor
Dan Gillmor is a noted American technology writer and columnist. He is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard...
, former technology columnist with the San Jose Mercury News
San Jose Mercury News
The San Jose Mercury News is a daily newspaper in San Jose, California. On its web site, however, it calls itself Silicon Valley Mercury News. The paper is owned by MediaNews Group...
, is one of the foremost proponents of citizen journalism, and founded a nonprofit, the Center for Citizen Media, to help promote it. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly known as CBC and officially as CBC/Radio-Canada, is a Canadian crown corporation that serves as the national public radio and television broadcaster...
's French-language television network has also organized a weekly public affairs program called, "5 sur 5", which has been organizing and promoting citizen-based journalism since 2001. On the program, viewers submit questions on a wide variety of topics, and they, accompanied by staff journalists, get to interview experts to obtain answers to their questions.
Jay Rosen
Jay Rosen
Jay Rosen is a media critic, a writer, and a professor of journalism at New York University.Rosen has been on the journalism faculty at New York University since 1986; from 1999 to 2005 he served as chair of the Department.He has been one of the earliest advocates and supporters of citizen...
, a journalism professor at New York University, was one of public journalism's earliest proponents. From 1993 to 1997, he directed the Project on Public Life and the Press, funded by the Knight Foundation and housed at NYU. He also currently runs the PressThink weblog.
External links
.- List of citizen journalism websites on Yahoo! DirectoryYahoo! DirectoryThe Yahoo! Directory is a web directory that rivals the Open Directory Project in size. The directory was Yahoo!'s first offering. When Yahoo! changed to crawler-based listings for its main results in October 2002, the human-edited directory's significance dropped, but it was still being updated in...
. - List of citizen journalism websites and Tools for citizen journalism on SourceWatchSourceWatchSourceWatch is an internet wiki site that is a collaborative project of the liberal Center for Media and Democracy...
. - Grassroot journalism and brand metrics – an evolving relationship
- Participatory Journalism – Risks and Opportunities for newspaper companies to grow with user-generated content.
- Hyperlocal news. Whose role is it anyway? on BBCBBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...