{"id":841,"date":"2005-07-30T15:54:24","date_gmt":"2005-07-30T20:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=841"},"modified":"2005-07-30T15:54:24","modified_gmt":"2005-07-30T20:54:24","slug":"citizen-journalism-is-more-fun-to-do-than-to-talk-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=841","title":{"rendered":"Citizen journalism is more fun to do than to talk about"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Blogher<\/a>, I was at a birds-of-a feather session on citizen journalism. It was moderated by Amy Gahran. Jay Rosen<\/a> was there, along with several others who are doing citizen journalism of various flavors.
\nThe 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.
\nThe 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.
\nCitizen journalism is more fun to do than to discuss. In the battle to save municipal wireless projects in Texas, Chip Rosenthal<\/a> 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.
\nWe 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.
\nWe 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.
\nWe 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.
\nBy committing acts of citizen journalism, whatever you call it, the new definitions will emerge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Citizen journalism is more fun to do than to talk about”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-dz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}