At Blogher, I was at a birds-of-a feather session on citizen journalism. It was moderated by Amy Gahran. Jay Rosen was there, along with several others who are doing citizen journalism of various flavors.
The discussion focused on the tired old wordgames — what is a journalist, what is a citizen journalist. Are bloggers journalists or not? How can citizen journalists be ethical? Is citizen journalism a good term, or is it intimidating for citizens, and exclusive of people who are non-citizens.
The discussion implies a zero-sum game of prestige and reputation between “old” and “new” journalism. I say it’s boring, and I say the heck with it.
Citizen journalism is more fun to do than to discuss. In the battle to save municipal wireless projects in Texas, Chip Rosenthal and I set up a weblog and a mailing list. And we covered the ins and outs of the issue through the legislative process. Someone attended the hearing, or watched it on video. We tracked the latest version of the bills.
We were doing “advocacy journalism” — we have an opinion — we’re not neutral on the question about whether cities and towns should be able to support broadband access. But we were covering the story. We often “broke” the story, simply because we following an issue closely, and the mainstream media has a broad beat and can’t cover everything. When we had news, we sent email to the reporters who were covering the issue for the mainstream media. And we became a source for the reporters.
We assembled a community. We found the people who were doing community broadband projects, and we wrote about them. We used the mailing list as a primary means of staying in touch with the community. And the blog did a great job of helping us link with others who were participating and covering the story, through comments and Technorati-discovered cross-links.
We didn’t complain that we were a few citizens fighting the phone company. We didn’t complain that the issue was undercovered by the mainstream media. We took the resources we had, and we used them. We didn’t spend time trying to define what we were doing. We just did it.
By committing acts of citizen journalism, whatever you call it, the new definitions will emerge.
Hey, Adina — it was great to meet you at BlogHer.
I agree, this is yet another case of semantic overanalyy sis. I’m starting to think it’s less useful to define the role than to describe the action.
That is, rather than saying “I am a citizen journalist” (role), it might work better to say something like “Right now I’m working on some independent reporting” (action).
Just a thought. I’ll chew on it some more. But I’d be curious what you think about that.
Advocacy journalism has a long and rich history. I’m glad you continued that tradition. There’s definitely room for lots of different kinds of journalism. Go for it.
– Amy Gahran
Editor, CONTENTIOUS
Thanks, Amy, and good to meet you as well.
The thing is, we didn’t run into any situations where we needed to identify ourselves as such. We attended hearings and meetings with legislative staff as citizens and as representatives of the savemuniwireless.org alliance.
When we quoted people in the blog, we told them that their words would be posted there. “May we quote you on the weblog”? Not “I am working on independing reporting”.
I suppose that “identity” or “credential” is needed for events that have artificial scarcity of press seats, such as political conventions or white house press briefings. And we didn’t have any such things in the muniwireless debate. Also these are notorious for their absense of news, so it doesn’t seem like any great honor to attend.
I suppose a label would be useful if we were raising money (we didn’t need to; our main resources were email, web postings, and volunteer time. We were allied with organizations that had budget for things like handouts and “fax-your-legislator” forms).
But even if we were raising money, the focus would be on the issue and desired result first and the medium second. There was a decision being made that affected people in Texas. In order to improve that decision, we needed to get timely information to people affected by the decision, others who were cared about similar issues (fellow bloggers), and to the general public via the traditional media.
The result was a flavor of advocacy journalism — we were breaking stories and doing original reporting. But their wasn’t any practical need for a label.
Hey, Adina — it was great to meet you at BlogHer.
I agree, this is yet another case of semantic overanalysis. I’m starting to think it’s less useful to define the role than to describe the action.
That is, rather than saying “I am a citizen journalist” (role), it might work better to say something like “Right now I’m doing some independent reporting” (action).
Just a thought. I’ll chew on it some more. But I’d be curious what you think about that.
Advocacy journalism has a long and rich history. I’m glad you’ve continued that tradition. There’s definitely room for lots of different kinds of journalism. Go for it.
– Amy Gahran
Editor, CONTENTIOUS