Your Guide to Citizen Journalism

by Mark Glaser, 11:29AM

From time to time, I’ll give an overview of one broad MediaShift topic, annotated with online resources and plenty of tips. The idea is to help you understand the topic, learn the jargon, and hopefully consider trying it out — even if it’s all new to you. I’ve already covered blogging and RSS feeds; this week I’ll look at citizen journalism.

What is Citizen Journalism?

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 YouTube .

All these might be considered acts of journalism, even if they don’t go beyond simple observation at the scene of an important event. Because of the wide dispersion of so many excellent tools for capturing live events — from tiny digital cameras to videophones — the average citizen can now make news and distribute it globally, an act that was once the province of established journalists and media companies.

There is some controversy over the term citizen journalism, because many professional journalists believe that only a trained journalist can understand the rigors and ethics involved in reporting the news. And conversely, there are many trained journalists who practice what might be considered citizen journalism by writing their own blogs or commentary online outside of the traditional journalism hierarchy. (See more on this in the Terminology section below).

One of the main concepts behind citizen journalism is that mainstream media reporters and producers are not the exclusive center of knowledge on a subject — the audience knows more collectively than the reporter alone. Now, many of these Big Media outlets are trying to harness the knowledge of their audience either through comments at the end of stories they post online or by creating citizen journalist databases of contributors or sources for stories.

You probably know the expression, “If you look in the dictionary for such-and-such definition, you should see a picture of so-and-so.” Well, if you look in the dictionary for the term citizen journalism, you should see a picture of Dan Gillmor, who’s pictured above. Gillmor wrote the first blog at a newspaper website, while he was a technology columnist at the San Jose Mercury News; wrote the seminal book, We the Media on the subject of grassroots media; and now runs the Center for Citizen Media , a joint project of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

History

In “We the Media,” Gillmor traces the roots of citizen journalism to the founding of the United States in the 18th century, when pamphleteers such as Thomas Paine and the anonymous authors of the Federalist Papers gained prominence by printing their own publications. Further advances such as the postal system — and its discount rates for newspapers — along with the telegraph and telephone helped people distribute news more widely.

In the modern era, video footage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the ’60s and footage of police beating Rodney King in Los Angeles in the ’80s were both captured by citizens on the scene. Plus, the rise of talk radio and even the D.I.Y. stylings of cable access TV and ‘zines gave average folks the chance to share their views with a much larger audience. In newspapers, there were letters to the editor and op-ed pieces submitted by citizens, while pirate radio stations hit the airwaves without the permission of the FCC. The advent of desktop publishing in the late ’80s allowed everyone to design and print out their own publications, but distribution was still limited.

With the rise of the World Wide Web in the ’90s, anyone could set up a personal home page to share their thoughts with the world. Chris Anderson, a doctoral student at Columbia University, wrote a useful timeline for citizen journalism that includes the advent of personal websites as well as the launch of the Indymedia site in 1999 after the WTO protests in Seattle that year. At Indymedia, anyone can share photos, text and video with other activists and the world.

Also in the ’90s, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen helped spearhead the public journalism or civic journalism movement, focused on getting mainstream reporters to serve the public. But right as that movement started to fade, the citizen journalism meme caught on after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S.

At that time in 2001, the earliest weblogs were more focused on reacting to the news and were written and read by a tech-savvy audience. But after 9/11, many ordinary citizens became on-the-spot witnesses to the attacks and their stories and images became a major part of the story. Popular libertarian political blogger Glenn Reynolds (pictured here), who writes Instapundit , rose to great influence in the charged atmosphere after 9/11.

Other important milestones in the recent history of citizen journalism include eyewitness bloggers in Iraq such as Salam Pax giving stunningly detailed early accounts of the war. Plus, at the 2004 U.S. political conventions, bloggers were given press passes for the first time. Later, in 2005, the earliest photos on the scene of the London bombings on July 7 were taken by ordinary citizens with their cameraphones. Mainstream media sites run by the BBC and MSNBC accepted photos, video and text reports — a practice that continues to this day among many major broadcasters.

Citizen journalists and bloggers also helped in the worldwide reaction and relief efforts to the tsunami and flooding in Southeast Asia in late 2004 and to damage wrought by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the U.S. in 2005.

Eventually, it wasn’t just Average Joe citizens running blogs and independent media sites online. Big-time entrepreneur billionaire Mark Cuban ran his own blog to share his viewpoints directly to the public, and celebrities helped put the group blog Huffington Post on the map — leading to a similar effort in the UK by the Guardian, Comment Is Free .

Terminology

The terms citizen journalism and citizen journalist are not popular among traditional journalists or even the people who are doing citizen journalism at the ground level because they are imprecise definitions. Aren’t professional journalists citizens as well? What if you’re an illegal alien and not really a citizen — does that invalidate your work?

The New West website has chosen to use the term “Unfiltered” for its citizen journalism contributions, and runs the following instructions for people to contribute: “Don’t let the ‘citizen journalism’ title scare you. Your post doesn’t have to be a structured article. It can be a rant, a rave, a rhyme, a short comment, a novel — anything you feel like writing. We just want to hear what’s on your mind.”

Other media thinkers have suggested alternate terms for citizen journalism. Here’s a list of some of those terms, with links to definitions or arguments for their use:

grassroots journalism

networked journalism

open source journalism

citizen media

participatory journalism

hyperlocal journalism

bottom-up journalism [check question #6]

stand-alone journalism

distributed journalism

Max Kalehoff, an executive at Nielsen BuzzMetrics, wrote this comment on Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog on a post about changing the term citizen journalism to networked journalism:

Why not just call journalism “journalism” — a word the citizens, amateurs, networks, distributors and professionals can understand? Journalism can be “practiced” in all sorts of ways, and by virtually anyone. You don’t even have to be a citizen or a professional; you could be a foreigner, or even an alien from outer space. But I do agree with your overall beat: journalism is not some exclusive club; it’s something that takes many forms, including all the ones you describe.

Ad Hoc Examples

When a traditional media outlet covers a story, the editor usually assigns the story to a reporter, the reporter does the work and turns in a story that gets edited and published. But in the case of ad hoc citizen journalism, a blogger or observer might see something happening that’s newsworthy and bring it to the attention of the blogosphere or the online public. As more people uncover facts and work together, the story can snowball without a guiding editor and produce interesting results — leading to the mainstream media finally covering it and giving it wider exposure.

Here are some older and newer examples of ad hoc citizen journalism:

> Trent Lott resigns as majority leader of the U.S. Senate in December 2002 after blogs keep up pressure over a racist remark he made.

> Conservative bloggers helped discredit documents related to President Bush’s National Guard service used in an episode of “60 Minutes II” in 2004. This became known as Rathergate.

> Various people worked together online to help identify the star of the Lonelygirl15 videos on YouTube as a New Zealand actress.

> A former Lockheed Martin engineer takes his story about security flaws with Coast Guard ships straight to YouTube after the mainstream media ignored his entreaties. Later, the Washington Post wrote about it .

Big Media and Hybrid Examples

While you might think that citizen media is only the province of people outside the mainstream media, that’s not remotely the case. In fact, one of the pioneering efforts in citizen journalism was the OhMyNews site in South Korea, launched in early 2000, which has become a popular mainstream news source in that Asian country. The site is a hybrid of professionally reported and citizen reported stories, with citizen journalists being paid small sums for the more popular work they do.

Mainstream newspaper publishers have created some of the more viable citizen media sites, from the Northwest Voice in Bakersfield, Calif., to the series of Your Hub sites out of Denver. Plus, Minnesota Public Radio has built a database of citizen contributors to help give reporters a more informed view of society with a project called Public Insight Journalism .

More hybrid projects have launched recently or are in the works, where paid professional editors, reporters or “network wranglers” help shape the story ideas while interested citizen journalists help do the research and dig up facts they know locally. Liberal political blogger Josh Marshall has launched one such effort called TPMmuckraker , and various groups collaborated on the recent Exposing Earmarks project to help reform “pork” add-ons to spending bills before the U.S. Congress.

Though many old-school journalists have been wary about the power wielded by citizen journalists, some of the more enlightened members of the journalism elite are starting to catch on. Kenneth Neil Cukier, a technology correspondent for The Economist in London, told the OpenBusiness blog these eye-opening thoughts on citizen journalists:

I acknowledge the problems but welcome the development of the ‘amateur journalist,’ akin to the ‘gentleman scientist’ of the 18th century, which did so much to advance knowledge. I believe journalism is undergoing its ‘reformational moment.’ By that I mean that the Internet is affecting journalism just as the printing press affected the Church — people are bypassing the sacrosanct authority of the journalist in the same way as Luther asserted that individuals could have a direct relationship with God without the intermediary of the priest. The Internet has disintermediated middlemen in other industries, why should journalism be immune?

The tools of broadcast media have gone from owning paper mills, presses, million-dollar transmitters and broadcast licenses, to having a cheap PC or a mobile phone in one’s pocket. That gives everyone the ability to have a direct rapport with the news as either a consumer or a producer, instantaneously. This is like the advent of literacy: it threatened elites and sometimes created problems. But it empowered individuals and led to a far better world. The new literacy from digital media will do the same, even as it creates new problems. Ultimately, I believe it is a positive thing for journalism, because it enables something journalism has lacked: competition from the very public we serve.

Resources

To learn more about citizen journalism, check out the following websites, articles and blogs:

We Media Report for The Media Center at the American Press Institute

We the Media book by Dan Gillmor

Citizen journalism definition at Wikipedia

CyberJournalist.net’s List of Citizen Media Initiatives

The New Voices: Hyperlocal Citizen Media Sites Want You (to Write)! at OJR

The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism by Steve Outing

What You Had to Say About Citizen Journalism by Steve Outing

Tools for Citizen Journalists

Citizen Media Cookbook by Hartsville Today [PDF file; requires Acrobat Reader]

How to Report a News Story Online by OJR

Center for Citizen Media

J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism

PJNet

A few prominent citizen media sites:

NowPublic

OurMedia

Backfence

TexasGigs

NewAssignment.net

As with all citizen media projects, this Guide will continue to be updated with your helpful input. If you’d like to add more resources to this list, or share your thoughts about citizen journalism in general, please do so in the comments below.

[Photo of Glenn Reynolds by JD Lasica .]

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