You’ll know I’m not a fan of much of the cack that surrounds citizen journalism. While, undoubtedly, the dread phrase can act as an umbrella for a collection of ideas that are going to change our business for a good, much of the debate habitually goes too far.

One moment, you’re discussing Dan Gillmor’s entirely rational suggestion that readers know more than you, so are worth engaging with. The next, you’re off on the weird techno-libertarian spur that says the readers are going to usurp the pros, get trained and then start getting paid, which - when you think about it - would leave us in a bloody strange position.

Into this difficult territory stumbles Britain’s National Union of Journalists (NUJ), the union to which I belong, and annually pay the equivalent of a Michelin starred meal for two. This week the union has produced a “code of conduct” for the “phenomenon of citizen journalism” after a round-table debate chaired by the Union’s General Secretary, Jeremy Dear, at the Guardian a few days ago.

What a bloody awful mess it the “code” is. While the round-table appeared to produce an interesting enough, if pretty unoriginal, discussion, the document itself appears to be a product of fear, rather than a vision of how things should be. Oh - and it really is a document, available only as a Word file from this page.

I take a closer look at some of the worst clauses after the jump…

“Witness contributors”
The horror starts with the awful name; presumably because “citizen journalism” implies anyone can be a journalist - a message that might not sit easily with some of the NUJ’s members - they’ve renamed citizen journalists as “witness contributors”. This does the seemingly impossible, and finds a worse name for the idea. Well done, chaps.

Delve beyond the title, and things get no better. The term “witness contributor” isn’t defined, but the second paragraph of the preamble…

“the integrity and reliability of material and the safety of bona fide newsgatherers may be challenged and compromised by the use of ‘witness contributions’.”

suggests they may mean witness contributors to be people who see news events happen in front of them, as happened on July 7 2005 in London. As Amy Gahran notes on her blog, what about everything else? Collaborative sites? Original, fully reported, acts of journalism that are blogged rather than published traditionally? Analysis? Reader comments on MSM blogs?

Wisdom of crowds, anyone?
The failure to define the term “witness contributor” means the code runs into trouble straight away, when it calls for “witness contributions” to abide by section one of the Press Complaints Commission’s code of practice - an altogether more serious document for newspaper journalists that, in the relevant clause, says “the Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures” and which, later, adds: “the Press, whilst free to be partisan, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact.”

The trouble with taking this old rule and applying it to the new world is that it’s drawn up for journalists publishing newspapers; a situation where a limited number of people act as gatekeepers to the information, where the addition of bias or inaccuracy can be sensibly monitored.

That ability is lost in a world where news organisations act as facilitators more than gatekeepers. The NUJ clearly doesn’t understand this, as clause two of their new code says news organisations should “provide sufficient resources for the adequate checking of witness contributions to establish their accuracy and authenticity”. Depending on the actual definition - and, again, we don’t actually know what this is - this may already be impossible.

A more sensible solution would be for news organisations simply to flag up what is user contributed, and what is staff produced, and allow the reader to make an informed judgment on the validity of the information. The NUJ apparently doesn’t understand why this would either be a useful thing, or how readers themselves could then do much of the checking through the various emerging tools of community; tagging, rating and the rest.

Always favour the pro
The bobbins continues. Clause three is a good, old-fashioned piece of protectionism.

“3. Such organisations recognise that journalists belonging to the
National Union of Journalists have agreed to uphold the union’s Code of Conduct and will strive to use material from such individuals wherever and whenever such alternatives to witness contributions are available;”

It’s the clause that rams the real motivation of this exercise home. The readers - the “witness contributors” - just can’t be trusted, and if there’s 99 readers and one pro in a room we should be “striving” to use the one, whatever the quality of that one’s material, and whatever the quality of the stuff from the other 99.

Making cit-j more expensive than pro
Clause four…

4. Such organisations accept that appropriate and agreed payments will be made to witness contributors for all uses of their material and that the terms of licensing will be easily available and clear;

This clause makes sure that, by attaching disproportionate cost to witness
contributions, they’re not used on any scale. Remember - by following the code this material is already subject to greater, more expensive, checks and balances than professional contributions because of clauses one and two.

In truth, payment for this stuff is unnecessary and even, in the case of most contributions, unwanted. The union would presumably balk at the notion that all eyewitnesses to a story would be paid for their print quotes: why are they insisting on payment when eyewitnesses email in their account, or send a mobile phone picture?

Preventing re-use and syndication
Finally…

5. Such organisations agree to respect fully the copyright(s) of the
witness contributors; material will not be passed to third parties – including the police and security services – without the specific
written agreement of a witness contributor, sub-poena or similar requirement from a court;

all of which ensures that, unlike pro content, user-generated content cannot be syndicated, even if a site’s terms and conditions specify this might happen. The clause does not specify what a third party is - part of the same group? Wholly or partially owned subsidiaries? - but does specify that a “witness contributor” must give written consent.

I know what this clause was supposed to do, but I know also what it does do.

The question
The NUJ’s top bods are experienced negotiators, and are also journalists, so presumably they know the importance of framing phrases carefully and accurately, lest there be misunderstanding or reinterpretation later.

So did they deliberately set out to kill user generated content with this code, or was it just an inability to grasp the issues involved that led them down this path?

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