Comments on: Let’s forget about citizen journalism

By: Stephanie Audet

Stephanie Audet — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 04:29:48 +0000

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.

By: Search

Search — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 23:00:33 +0000

great site

By: Kevin Marks

Kevin Marks — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 08:06:10 +0000

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.

By: Strange Attractor

Strange Attractor — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 00:48:10 +0000

Citizen storytelling

Neil McIntosh lofts the ball of citizen journalism high into the air and hits it with a heavy bat. Not quite a six, but certainly a respectable four, although some of those runs are in the comments….

By: Martin Stabe

Martin Stabe — Sun, 14 Aug 2005 01:46:06 +0000

Citizen journalism debate on Today

The Today programme this morning featured a package about “citizen journalism” (RealAudio). Ian Hargreaves of Cardiff University is a fan, saying that journalism has been over-professionalised. Neil McIntosh of the Guardian web site, who is…

By: Robert Andrews

Robert Andrews — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 21:18:12 +0000

“Citizen journalism” is sooo last week

And yet more “citizen journalism” London bombs blurb now that BBC media correspondent Torin Douglas has discovered the phenomenon. You could be forgiven for feeling a little like Neil McIntosh, who says “let’s forget about” that term. There’s no doubt…

By: New Media Musings

New Media Musings — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 18:50:03 +0000

‘Let’s forget about citizen journalism’

Neil McIntosh, an editor at the UK’s Guardian, writes: Let’s forget about citizen journalism. McIntosh cites approvingly this comment on another blog: “Weblogs and flickr can complement traditional journalism, but they can’t supplant it.” Well, that’s …

By: Vincent Maher

Vincent Maher — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 09:03:26 +0000

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)

By: Charles

Charles — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 23:32:40 +0000

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.

By: Nik

Nik — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 21:24:15 +0000

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?