Citizen journalism has been in the news lately especially during the coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy and thereafter. The role played by the students in getting the news out and in keeping everyone informed was remarkable. There are those who believe the age of citizen journalism has now fully arrived and those who believe the media is only now reaping the benefits of a citizen-led/citizen-initiated journalism effort that started less than a decade ago.
Gone are the days when big media were the people who got all the exclusive insights when a story broke. Ordinary citizens without press passes and training are now the people who are getting out the news and the professional media is running after them for the details by visiting their blogs, podcasts, inviting people to upload pictures, video and voice clips, etc. Such was the case in the coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy. Everyone may not be aware that the first video and audio clips of the Virginia Tech incident were not captured by traditional reporters but by a student who used his cell phone. That cell phone recording of the scene was subsequently purchased by CNN. All media organizations went on the Internet to view blogs written by students as a way of updating themselves on the shooting incident.
Jeff Jarvis, veteran journalist and media critic who blogs at “buzzmachine.com” believes that this is the beginning of more changes to come in the architecture of news and media. He observes that there is a benefit to news organizations as they can get more first hand views of events from citizens than from a reporter who filters what needs to be reported. I share in Jarvis’s observation and anticipate an increase in the number of media organizations that put an effort into building a strong bond with their audiences through the Internet as well as other means. I see a kind of symbiotic relationship now emerging between many media organizations and their citizens.
How is the media already working with citizens?
Media organizations in most cases aided by the Internet are sharing their space with citizens to tell stories of events happening in the world. In Ghana, people on a daily basis call or text into Phone-in programs on radio and Television and to newspapers commenting on news stories or contributing to discussion programs. Publishers and some radio stations especially who have websites allow user comments. The user comments attached to individual stories make it possible for people to react to the stories posted by either criticizing or praising the news item and/or add to the content of the story posted if they have some new information the professional reporter didn’t have access to. My favorite examples of such news sites in Ghana are ghanaweb.com and myjoyonline.com. These two are what I consider the most interactive websites in Ghana presently. Unfortunately, some people who visit Ghanaweb.com especially abuse this opportunity when they equate maligning people to expressing their candid views. A similar situation had prevailed on myjoyonline.com until they decided to moderate their site.
This description fits the most basic form of citizen journalism referred to as user comments approach. Media organizations are evolving different approaches in engaging their audiences. The Spokesman Review, a newspaper in Spokane, Washington State has developed different ways of connecting to their readers. Reporters in the newsroom have access to an email database of their readers developed by Ken Sands (the online publisher) to jumpstart their news gathering process. Sands tells me that reporters usually solicit information and experiences from members of the public on selected stories and add the feedback to the main story to enrich it. Responses received are incorporated into the story and the readers credited for it.
News editors are also increasingly making an effort to ensure that their audiences understand exactly what goes on in a newsroom. Some have created an editor’s blog, on which they constantly explain the reasoning behind certain decisions that they have made and as welcoming comments, criticism or any new information from people. It takes a certain level of self-awareness for this kind of conversation to take place. The awareness that, as an editor it’s my duty to explain to the public what influences my editorial decisions have. It clears the air and hopefully will assuage some of the suspicions people have about the media’s work. There are those who believe that this makes the newsroom transparent. On this blog a reader can challenge and criticize a newspaper’s editorial policy and question the editor. In most cases the editor will respond and explain the reasoning behind giving a story a particular slant. The Spokesman Review newspaper has gone a step further by webcasting its daily news meetings. The editors at the BBC have for this whole week remindered readers of the number of days that its Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston has been missing. The editors are presently explaining the reasoning behind it.
The next big thing that is happening in citizen journalism is blogging. Many people are writing blogs, blogging just about everything happening around them. Some write about serious stuff while others are more into trivialities. But when something important happens, all these blogs within the area of the incident report on it. It is therefore not surprising that big markets media are linking these blogs to their websites when a big news event happens.
CNN for example has introduced I-Report, a citizen journalism feature which encourages people to upload pictures, video and clips of things happening in their community. One of the first video/audio clips of the Virginia Techv shooting incident received by CNN was on its I-Report feature. What this feature does is to encourage citizens to become reporters for their communities by uploading images, which otherwise would have appeared in the media.
The BBC has for a while posted what it calls "Have your say" on its websites and typically solicits information from people in locations where some important news events are breaking. Recently, during the Nigeria elections, the BBC empaneled a number of Nigerian voters and observes who reflected on the entire process while reporting directly to the BBC on events as they unfolded in that country. This ensured that the BBC had information from different parts of the country. This is not the first time that the BBC has crowded sourced its news, and I believe it won’t be the last.
My concerns, however, are how sustainable such efforts are in the face of commercialization and competition. The BBC finds itself in a different position since it is a public news organization and so can afford to devote space and time to citizen journalists. But what about the big media markets like the CNN, FOX, New York Times, to name just a few US-based outlets? So far all the initiatives discussed above are event driven. Could they at some point offer real space for dialogue?
