Citizen Journalism: A News {{[}}R{{]}}evolution

▪ 2009

by Lawrence Albarado

      The phenomenon called “citizen journalism” expanded its worldwide influence in 2008 in spite of continuing concerns over whether “citizen” journalists were “real” journalists. Citizens in disaster zones provided instant text and visual reporting from the scene. People in countries affected by violence used a variety of technological tools to share information about hot spots. An unpaid, untrained volunteer journalist broke news about a U.S. presidential candidate and in doing so became news herself. Swirling in the background of these developments was a debate over whether the term citizen journalism was itself accurate.

      The term citizen journalism derived from South Korean online entrepreneur Oh Yeon Ho's declaration in 2000 that “every citizen is a reporter.” Oh and three South Korean colleagues started an online daily newspaper in 2000 because, he said, they were dissatisfied with the traditional South Korean press. Unable to afford the costs of hiring professionals and printing a newspaper, they started OhmyNews, a Web site that used volunteers to generate its content. In a speech on the site's seventh anniversary, Oh, the firm's president and CEO, noted that the news site began with 727 citizen reporters and had grown to 50,000 contributors reporting from 100 countries by 2007.

      Since OhmyNews's adoption of “Every citizen is a reporter” as its motto, the Internet had spawned thousands of news sites and millions of bloggers (individuals who keep regular online journals called blogs, short for Web logs). Traditional news organizations, while battling declining readership and viewership, leapt into the fray with their own Web sites and blogs by their own journalists, and many newspapers invited readers to contribute community news to the papers' Web sites. Citizens started their own “hyperlocal” online news sites to cover happenings in their neighbourhoods or specialized topics of interest that were not reported by larger media organizations.

      Among those who studied and nurtured citizen journalism, the term often went by other names. In a 2007 article for Online Journalism Review (www.ojr.org), Senior Editor J.D. Lasica called it “participatory journalism,” though he described it as “a slippery creature. Everyone knows what audience participation means, but when does that translate into journalism? Alas, there's no simple answer.” Dan Gillmor, founder and director of the Center for Citizen Media (http://citmedia.org)—a nonprofit affiliated jointly with the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School—and author of the book We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (2004), also rejected any single definition for the transformation in news that began taking place in the late 1990s. “It's a time of incredible exploration,” because of the democratization of access to inexpensive and ubiquitous publishing tools, said Gillmor. New York University journalism professor and online media thinker Jay Rosen came close to a unified theory of citizen journalism in a July 14, 2008, post on his PressThink blog (http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/): “When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that's citizen journalism.”

      People around the world participated in this phenomenon. Earthquake victims in China's Sichuan province in May 2008 took up cellular telephones to send text messages and images from the disaster zone to the world. When the Kenyan government shut down traditional media outlets in the violent aftermath of disputed national elections in late 2007, Africa-based bloggers encouraged citizens to use their cell phones to report incidents of violence by voice, text messages, and images. Citizens by the thousands did exactly that. Within the first two weeks of 2008, some of those bloggers created www.Ushahidi.com, which combined Google maps and a “crowdsourced” database of violent incidents to give readers a near real-time visual glimpse of where outbreaks were occurring. In late November 2008 some bystanders used social networking Web sites such as Twitter and Flickr to upload live reports, digital photos, and video of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai (Bombay), while others used their cell phones to send updated reports to more traditional news services or to transmit text messages to people trapped inside the hotels under attack.

      An experiment in “hybrid” citizen journalism at www.HuffingtonPost.com generated controversy during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign when Mayhill Fowler, an amateur writer and supporter of candidate Barack Obama, reported in April 2008 that the Democrat had described working-class Pennsylvanians as “bitter.” The incident, buried in a longer post on the site's OffTheBus blog, gave Republicans and some of Obama's Democratic rivals ammunition to call him an “elitist.” Fowler's report drew criticism from other media. Some attacked as unethical her reporting of remarks made at a private fund-raiser that had excluded traditional journalists. Rosen, cocreator with Arianna Huffington of the blog, defended Fowler. Rosen wrote in a post on PressThink that he and Huffington “felt that participants in political life had a right to report on what they saw and heard themselves, not as journalists claiming no attachments but as citizens with attachments who were relinquishing none of their rights.” Traditional journalists disagreed vehemently with Rosen's position, citing the long-held ethical belief that journalists should remain independent from those whom they cover. Most traditional news organizations, in fact, prohibited political involvement by their reporters.

      Several groups in 2008 offered training to individuals who wanted to improve their reporting skills and learn how to make ethical decisions. For example, the Knight Citizen News Network (www.kcnn.org) sponsored J-Learning (www.j-learning.org). Both KCNN and J-Learning offered textbooks, guides to legal issues from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and links to other programs, such as online training offered by the Florida-based Poynter Institute at www.newsu.org. The Society of Professional Journalists (www.spj.org), which was preparing to celebrate its 100th year in 2009, began a traveling program in 2008 called Citizen Journalism Academy that provided skills training, information about legal issues, and guidance regarding the society's Code of Ethics.

      Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, said that she preferred the term “citizen media makers instead of citizen journalists because we need to understand that the kinds of things we're seeing have their own value propositions, and those may be very different from the values we associate with conventional journalism. Most citmedia makers don't aspire to be ‘journalists' and I think we need to be careful not to require them to be members of a tribe that they don't necessarily want to belong to.”

      Beginning in 2005, J-Lab, based in Washington, D.C., provided start-up funds to 40 citizen media projects through an incubator program called New Voices. The 10 projects that received funds in 2008 included a proposal by Kent (Ohio) State University to train student journalists and general aviation enthusiasts to write about Ohio's 166 public airports, 772 private airfields, and 18,000 pilots for online publication and for newspapers, public radio, and television. Another New Voices-funded project planned to start a digital neighbourhood newspaper using citizen reporters and aimed at building a sense of community across racial, ethnic, and income divisions in Lexington, Ky.

      In 2008 Schaffer cited many examples of the variety of citizen-journalism efforts: networked sites, such as NowPublic.com and Helium.com, that sought to aggregate citizen photos, video footage, and articles from around the world; conventional media that attracted citizen-generated content, including CNN's iReport.com and the Denver-based YourHub.com; microlocal community news sites such as NewCastleNow.org and ForumHome.org that were founded by ordinary citizens to fill an information vacuum; and microlocal sites founded by former journalists, such as Baristanet.com, MinnPost.com, NewHavenIndependent.com, and HuffingtonPost.com. Bloggers in Third World countries often filled in when media were government-controlled or absent with sites such as GlobalVoicesOnline.org, or they used cell phone text messages to report on crisis hotspots. For its efforts, Ushahidi.com won one of J-Lab's 2008 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. As Schaffer said, “We began to see clearly how citizen media is not just one big phenomenon, but the onset of many different niches being occupied by various citizen media makers.”

Lawrence Albarado is Projects Editor for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and a member of the board of directors for the Society of Professional Journalists.

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