BUSTING CITIZEN JOURNALISM

Samantha Henig at Columbia Journalism Review takes in the buzz surrounding citizen journalism and finds there is either not much too it or mainstream media is having trouble finding good examples of honest-to-god journalism. She writes:

Two weeks ago we set out some guidelines for distinguishing between “participatory journalists,” who send information and photos in to edited news sites, and “citizen journalists,” who write their own news articles and post them on unedited sites. The need for such a distinction comes in response to major newspapers’ recent tendency to point to anything published online and vaguely involving the news as just another example of the massive explosion that is citizen journalism. Our fear: Perhaps this “explosion” only seems so huge because the vague definition of “citizen journalism” allows newspapers to yield the term with minimal discretion.

The essay is a needed antidote to the outpouring of newspaper articles about citizen journalism, touting it as a “next big thing.” We’re seeing only the beginning of the possibilities for citizen journalism (I prefer the term personal media) and the interaction between publications and readers is only a small part of what’s happening. As the CJR piece points out, citizen journalism/personal media is not about what we think of as readers flooding existing media with rants and raves or snapshots of accidents they happen to be passing. That’s always been a part of media and it’s only the delivery mechanisms (snail mail vs. email; letters to the editor vs. online forums) that have changed.

We have other examples that bear more study and that have so far slipped beneath the notice of big media, sites like Barry Parr’s Coastsider.

The danger is that the attention being paid to citizen journalism, and the misreading of what it is and will become, may leave the majority of people with the idea that citizen journalism is only about new-form letters to the editor or about a slightly changed relationship between media and “consumer.” If the only examples of it that people are exposed to are weak and pallid, it will be harder for serious citizen journalism experiments and initiatives to gain much traction.

UPDATE: Even before I finished this post (no, bloggers don’t just dash off whatever happens to pop into their heads, or at least this blogger doesn’t), I came across Terry Heaton’s excellent post on what’s happening in the space where mainstream media and personal media collide. It adds a lot to the continuing discussion about what media is becoming.

TECHNORATI TAGS: JOURNALISM, CITIZEN MEDIA