M’colleague Jane Perrone has written an excellent post on Newsblog about a piece of commentary by a journalism academic, Vincent Maher, in the wake of the bomb alerts in London last Thursday.
Maher complained about the lack of citizen journalism taking place on the day. "Maybe they’re all asleep", he sniffed, complaining that nobody was posting first-hand accounts, or photographs or video in the wake of the four would-be suicide attacks. He was even upset that someone’s faintly trivial post about How Terrible It All Is lay at the top of Technorati when he first looked in.
First thought: more fool him for trusting the unreliable Technorati to spot stuff (Robin Grant was doing a much better job of pulling things together over at perfect.co.uk). Second thought: he’s doing what so many champions of citizen journalism tend to do; insisting on applying old journalism models of working to judge what citizen journalism is, or is going to be.
Let me explain. I think it’s time to stop calling citizen journalism… well, citizen journalism. The current notion of what that dread phrase actually constitutes is essentially a product of old-fashioned, centralised, old media thinking, and needs to be thrown out. As one commenter on Jane’s post has put it:
"News journalism requires a level of commitment that only the hardcore amateur news junky could muster. Taking a picture of an event you happen to be close to is not journalism. Let’s face it: new forms of independent journalism have and will continue to appear, but don’t expect a flurry of well-written and accurate on-the-scene reports from the public at large any time soon. Weblogs and flickr can complement traditional journalism, but they can’t supplant it."
Now here’s a paragraph that, for all its brevity, could save millions in venture capital, prevent decades of accumulated wasted time, and abort countless circle-jerk conferences.
Let’s stop trying to make members of the public go to work like paid journalists.
While we’re at it, we could also concede that other attempts to get Ordinary People to behave like journalists – Ohmynews I’m looking at you – are also unforgivably lame? Student newspapers, only without the brevity?
Let’s, instead, alight on a model of citizen storytelling. Now, I know, storytelling gets a rough ride. Telling stories is something you do to children, or which children do to one another. And, vitally for the hype factor, storytelling just isn’t the ticket if you’re an academic trying to make a name for himself, or a businessperson trying to locate the Next Big Thing.
A pitch for encouraging citizen journalism might attract venture capital bucks. A pitch to facilitate storytelling probably won’t even wash down the Arts Council.
But stories really are very important. They’re the way we communicate. Or, at least, they’re the way we communicate whenever we’re being our most interesting and engaging. We tell stories at barbecues whether we’re talking about our holidays or the half-assed thing someone did on the way to work the other day. We tell stories when we get home about what happened at work, or when we’re describing a great goal at the football.
We even use stories to paint a picture of how we’d like things to be – when we want to make a group of people pay attention to our point in a meeting or in a speech.
What blogs, and picture phones, and other "me media" do is bring everyday storytelling to the web. They’re mainly personal stories, being published – yes – for an audience, but an audience that we think we know very well. And we tell those stories using the words we write on simple CMSs, like blogs, or via pictures distributed via Flickr, or movies made in iMovie.
Occasionally – very occasionally – those stories, pictures and movies will intersect with a story which a very large audience is interested in, as happened to the mobloggers who got pictures of the July 7 bombings. But a big, mainstream audience is never the intention – we’re just using technology to do what we’ve always done, and tell stories.
In big media terms, however, there’s a problem if you start relying on this amateur army to replace a journalism which – let’s say – you believe doesn’t represent your views, or is corrupt, or you’re bored with. These amateur storytellers only form a rather chaotic patchwork of what editors would call "coverage". It means you’re never going to be quite sure who has seen what, how soon they’ll "report" that experience, and where you can find the resultant information.
That’s why Google and Technorati and other aggregators – mechanical and human – will grow in value. They’ll be the places that pull together the things you want to read about, from corners of the web you’ve never visited, and may never return to.
But for old media types used to the certainties of a newsroom full of reporters, ready to swarm on what the editors decided was newsworthy, that chaotic, laissez faire arrangement may feel very uncomfortable.
For instance, it means some things that anyone might regard as highly newsworthy – such as Thursday’s explosions around London – may get very few stories told about them in the immediate aftermath, simply because those explosions are outside the experience of most people.
They didn’t see anything, so there’s nothing to report. They can only talk about the events second hand, about how those events make them feel. And that’ll come after they’ve had the details related to them by the professional journalists who make up for not having actually been there by travelling around, asking questions, doing research and, basically, working quite hard.
Those events that will be well covered will tend to be ones that take place in front of lots of people – July 7, 9/11, Live8, others to come. It explains why our Blair Watch Project – where we asked members of the public to send in mobile phone pix of politicians doing their campaigning during the General Election campaign – didn’t really work as expected. The problem was the last election campaign didn’t really take place in front of the public – it happened before party loyalists and the professional media.
So where does this leave us? Well, increasingly, I believe that one of the next steps in online journalism is going to be about the various elements in this story – professional journalists, amateur storytellers, editors, computer-powered aggregators – finding their place in the structure, supporting one another and doing things the others can’t. An ecosystem will build up – quite fluid, and as appreciative of big centralised efforts to organise as a herd of mogs.
And that means people like Vincent Maher have to write less about "hating" to defend "traditional" media, and get on with the business of training professional journalists who know how to tap into the web’s emerging storytelling culture to get new stories, and improve on the ones they’ve always written.
That’s where the revolution will lie – not in "citizen journalists" overthrowing the professionals, but in countless individual stories being told, and then highlighted when they happen to touch on a matter of mainstream interest.
Its quite strange that this discussion has turned towards citizen journalism and whether or not it can supplant traditional media. The most important aspect of this debate, I suppose, is that they are two completely different things, espcially in terms of the role they play in the construction of knowlege – trad media is top-down authorartative whereas citizen journalism is part of the spaghetti network of knowlege that is essentially group-subjective.
My original commentary might be strengthened by the following: After 9/11, Dan Gilmor’s book, Iraq, Live8 and 7/7, citizen journalism, or reporting, has been shot down by the traditional media because they see it as a threat – newspaper sales are down, craigslist is killing classad sales in SF and generally things are looking bad for print media. That’s the set-up for disappointment
BUT
I still think that people who are in and around events are in a better position to post them to their moblogs, blogs etc simply because they are there. So, when hours after the event happened the blogging was looking weak I started getting worried. The real issue was that tools like Technorati and google aren’t perfect for indexing rapid coverage of an event like that.
In fact its a problem with the architecture of the Web, not the search engines. The web is an environment with no underlying meaning structures so its hard to find things and they are often not what you want. Now, the Semantic Web, a project that will probably restucture the web into a machine-understandable format, will make things a lot better in the future because each mob pic will be tagged in terms of its relations to places, dates, events, etc. The web wil become a giant database, eseentially.
Anyways, that doesn’t help us right now. Just don’t jump to the conclusion that because I am an academic I come from some sort of traditional point of view on this, beleive me I am all for a major paradigm shift when it comes to reporting events and telling stories.
Vincent says: “beleive me I am all for a major paradigm shift when it comes to reporting events and telling stories.”
Just one question: Why? In what ways do you think that news gathering and reporting would be improved by a change? What are the weaknesses that need addressing?
One thing that is never discussed when people debate the subject of citizen journalism is the difference types of news out there. I would tend to agree with you that for the big, national stories it is undoubtably the paid, professional journalists who are probably best placed to gather and report on the news. They do the legwork and ask the questions.
However, I completely disagree with you when it comes to local news. Local news, though often laughed at by the “big time” journalists, is important for people in their everyday lives. But for the most part, it is local people, calling in to the local newspaper, which forms the basis of local news. Local “journalists” then repackage what has been told to them. What is the value of this? Those local people who are really the true newsgatherers, are a far more important part of the process.
This isn’t storytelling as you put it. It just doesn’t happen to be the earth shattering scoops that you might expect in national news. However, it is important news for local people. And arguably, they ar emuch closer to the ground than the “professional” paid journalists.
I choose to applaud the ‘herding cats’ reference.
The paradigm shift I am all for is the move from centralised and hierarchial gatekeeping practised by the trad media right now. There are several disadvantages that come out quite often – 1. tree shaped knowlege is less flexible and more ideologically insidious than the type of spaghetti subjective knowlege you find in the blogosphere 2. journalism is not a profession, it is a practice, but this is not the view of the trad media themselves 3. the claim to objective knowlege is a false one but is, itself, used to justify its own priveleged position.
In addition, the story-telling format of the traditional media does not capture the public imagination as much as the formats of blogs or tabloids because it tries to eliminate multiple readings.
So when I say I am keen for a paradigm change, what I am saying is that either bloggers need to start taking themselves more seriously or the traditional media needs to start taking themselves less seriously.
Vincent, that’s very interesting paradigm shift you’re looking for: “either bloggers need to start taking themselves more seriously or the traditional media needs to start taking themselves less seriously”.
So from this I understand the following:
1. There is a spectrum of “reporting style”, with bloggers near one end, and traditional media near the other.
2. You didn’t suggest that (a) bloggers and tradders should cover more points on this spectrum, but rather that (b) there is a point on the spectrum between them that needs to be occupied by either one of them.
3. The only reason to advocate (b) over (a) is if you think there is a single “correct” point on this spectrum which represents the single “correct” style to report events.
That conclusion seems terribly presumptious and prescriptive. In fact, I can’t believe you think this. So what have I got wrong here?
I think that the point about “stories” and storytelling is the key one. Journalists talk about “stories” all the time: that’s the stuff that goes into papers and magazines and websites. What is different about how the media handled 7/7 and the subsequent days is that trained journalists know to ask: “What’s the story?” Not just “what happened to these people?” or “Who did this?” but also “how does all this fit together?”
That sort of analytic approach to events isn’t easily learnt, in my experience of people trying to tell me stuff. Cutting to the chase while also not throwing out the baby with the bathwater (mm, metaphor mix time) is the sort of thing that citizen “journalists” can’t do. Or if they do, one offers them a job on the paper or magazine, on the spot.
Tracy’s point about local journalism isn’t correct, actually. The local papers where I live tell pretty much the stories that people tell each other: arguments about pub licensing, fairs, petty vandalism, and so on. They get those stories from local people. How else? And most national journalists start out on local papers. They don’t laugh at it – they recognise it as their bedrock.
Hi Nik and Charles
There is definately a spectrum and a lot of what makes it a wide one has to do with methodology and rules of practice. For instance, a story published in a newspaper goes through a process of checking, in most cases, and editing before it gets published. This would include, for instance, source verification and technical things like spelling.
Bloggers, on the other hand, don’t face the same constraints and can publish much quicker and from a different and more subjective angle. What I was suggesting in my previous post is that the bloggers who consciously provide an alternative to the traditional media need to adopt a slightly higher standard of writing and research otherwise their credibility is going to take a knock. The collaborative tools to determine the credibility of a story are on their way but right now bloggers need to be more serious about getting facts straight IF that’s what they are claiming to report. The actual nature of the content they post is something that should stay the same or go even further away from the objective inverted pyramid of the trad media style.
I guerss I should say more here but will continue posting later, lets keep this discussion going because its a good one (am at a hackers conference near Eindhoven so schedule a bit erratic)
Neil, Just found this via Strange Attractor, and I’d like to push back a bit (I work for Technorati, and am a Londoner by origin)
As you say, it is likely that on the 21st very few Londoners had blogged interesting stories or photos for you to find via Technorati – which is a good indicator that those attacks were damp squibs.
The morning of the 7th was very different. I was up at the time (it being a bit after 1am in California when first reports came in), and I saw an alert in the #wikinews IRC channel on freenode.
I saw a lot of citizen journalism going on then – the page http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.....Londonwiki was started at 8.28am GMT (9.28am BST), and was rapidly incorporating reports from people via IRC, instant messaging and email (look at its edit history).
I did Technorati searches for ‘london’ and ‘bomb’ and fed posts and pictures to the wikinews editors, who combined the personal stories into reportage – the moblog photo from inside the tunnel here http://moblog.co.uk/view.php?id=77571 showed up on Technorati within minutes and got onto Wikinews 10 minutes later.
So why am I telling you this? Not to boast about Technorati – while our keyword search is very timely, we still have a lot of work to do to get URL search back up to standards we can be proud of again.
The point is that the blog storytelling model and the journalist reportage model can coexist, and feed one another, and that you may want to look to wikinews for a model for how this can be done well, especially in a big breaking news story.
Hi!
Firstly, I’d like to say thanks for the good post! I am a University student and have been learning quite a bit on the topic of Citizen Journalism. I agree with your opinion that Citizen Journalism will not replace traditional Journalism as we will always need this form of media for information and facts. What I don’t agree with is that blogs should be about “story-telling”. I think blogs are an excellent source for finding opinions of ordinary folk as traditional journalism can be biased or information can be silenced. From my experience, there are blogs out there that are well written and look like a professional journalist has written them, however there are some that are the complete opposite. This is why blogs should mostly be used for opinions. The importance is to keep it balance, to consume both forms of professional and amateur media.
Another point I want to mention is how video websites such as Youtube can be used as another way to create Citizen Journalism. Yes, a lot of Videos on Youtube are completely unrelated to journalism however there are quite a few “News video-blog” channels such as Whatthebuckshow who posts video on entertainment news. There are also user-made educational videos. My prediction is that soon, more and more people will be creating their own journalism as it has become very easy to.
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