citizen journalism: truth, trust and power

March 4th, 2009

Jeff Bercovici writes, Hearst Newspapers, The New York Times Co. and the Washington Times have all announced plans to harvest the reporting of non-professional volunteers.

But why uncomfortable bedfellows? Because

There’s a healthy dose of irony here, especially when it comes to Hearst, which also said last week that it plans to start charging for much of the content on its newspapers’ websites. In essence, Hearst is saying to readers: Please start paying us for our content, and, while you’re at it, please supply the content.

The timing of the two developments is no coincidence, of course. Media companies are taking a hard look at the citizen-journalism model as it becomes clear that the professional-journalism model is no longer tenable, at least not at the scale they’ve been supporting it. As Simon Dumenco puts it, “[D]espite the highfalutin civic-mindedness implicit in the term ‘citizen journalism,’ the truth is that a lot of big media organizations seem to regard the phenomenon as, mostly, a way to get more content for free or on the cheap.”

There is a quote that is appropriate as a muse on Bercovici’s comments, that ‘people die like days do gasping for every last ray of light’. We have to ask ourselves what is the relationship between media and its audience? Especially when we are starting to see a form of permeability between organisations and the outside world populated by us.

Bercovici also states

Even when it’s not outright fallacious, the quality of amateur journalism is often pretty low.

Well, in response to that, yes he is right, but I can tell you that the quality of journalism in all the “free” newspapers shoved into peoples hands and left to litter city centres, is not even a vague attempt at journalism.

What about Pro-Publica then? as a new model for journalism.

The first major investigation by ProPublica was broadcast on 60 Minutes and continued on the website thereafter. It looked at Alhurra, the US-funded Arabic TV station broadcast across the Middle East. The film was made by Dafna Linzer, hired by the site from the Washington Post. It uncovers how a US attempt to put its viewpoint across in the region, as an alternative to al-Jazeera, has been poorly managed and ineffective. The network reaches barely 2% of the population, and has given air time to groups classed by the US government as terrorist.

Media, mediated media, trust, the architecture of authority, truth, relevancy, obsolescence, and information, are all inter-related memes.

In the craftsman as citizen journalist I wrote,

We have done a great job in separating commerce from community, stripping away the glue that binds us together in meaningful ways. In Medieval times village life was described has having high participation levels, but low skill levels. Hence everyone became part of co-creating the experience, of co-creating the value, they reinforced the bonds of community and belonging. People embraced what they created.

I see no difference here in what citizen journalism offers. The Craftsman is a citizen journalist who can speak the truth to power. In many ways Jeff Bercovici, undoes himself as he writes, by not shining a light on really what underpins citizen journalism. He points to the exploitation of citizen journalists under-paid to write blog posts and he points to significant inaccuracies. Sorry I thought that also happened in “professional papers” too?

And as one elegant example of harnessing collective intelligence, and building a coalition of citizen reporters for the public good we need look no further than a story about what The News Press in Fort Myers Florida achieved.

In May, readers from the nearby community of Cape Coral began calling the paper, complaining about the high prices – as much as $28,000 in some cases – being charged to connect newly constructed homes to water and sewer lines.

Maness, the editor asked the News-Press to employ a new method of looking into the complaints. “Rather than start a long investigation and come out months later in the paper with our findings we asked our readers to help us find out why the cost was so exorbitant,” said Kate Marymont, the News-Press’ editor in chief. The response overwhelmed the paper, which has a circulation of about 100,000. “We weren’t prepared for the volume, and we had to throw a lot more firepower just to handle the phone calls and e-mails.”

As a consequence, engineers, accountants, whistle blowers and a whole lot besides, gathered around this particular problem. The result an in-depth, well researched, factually correct story that saw the company that was hiking the prices fined, and senior employees sacked for misconduct.

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