Citizen journalism and social media

Posted in Uncategorized on February 26th, 2025
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These are my notes from a talk I gave as part of the City of Sydney Library Talks on social media. I thought I’d get them up sooner rather than later so forgive their roughness.

I’m sure by now most of you’ll know that Whitney Houston passed away last week, but many of you might not be aware that the story was actually broken on Twitter by a girl whose aunt worked for in Houston. She tweeted about it 27 minutes before any official statements.

It’s not the most traditional wording for BREAKING NEWS, but that is what it is.

In May last year, it was Keith Urbahn and who formally worked for Donald Rumsfield’s office that broke the news on Twitter that Osama bin Laden had also been killed by the US government.

I’m not suggesting that twitter is a great place for breaking death notices but these are examples where citizens not reporters have broken fairly significant stories on twitter in a way that they otherwise would not have been able to. I refer to these as “random acts of journalism”, a term coined by NYU Professor Jay Rosen.

The Internet is 40 years old – so it’s been a long journey from the point where the first message sent was “lo” – to today, where anyone can effectively break news like we’ve seen on Twitter.

It wasn’t really until things like blogger, a blog publishing service that was launched in 1999, that everyday people actually had the ability to create content and put it online without any technical knowledge or understanding of HTML.

Flickr was launched in 2004, becoming one of the first and most accessible online communities of photographers which is now used by many organisations as a place to find photos in breaking stories. It introduced tagging, making photos searchable, and groups that made finding photos relating to specific events easy.

Prior to Youtube, which was only launched in 2005, there was no common format for videos. meaning that unless you had a compatible file your video could not be uploaded online.

Before Twitter, which came in being in 2006, there was no way to easily break news is almost real-time fashion.

And Facebook, the one we all love to hate, has played a significant part in bringing together communities of activists as witnessed in Egypt last year.

I think in the last year we’ve effectively seen two forms of citizen journalism emerging, aided by the platforms I’ve mentioned.

The first are those I referred to earlier and are those random acts of journalism. That is, you are in the right place at the right time and something happens and you are able to report on it.

Here’s one of the most famous examples from Janis Krums from Sarasota Florida who was the first to post a picture of US airways flight 1549 on twitter when it landed in the Hudson. He tweeted “there’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. crazy.”

We see it happen a lot during earthquakes and other natural disasters. It’s not premeditated people aren’t anticipating that they will be reporting news.

The second form of citizen journalism we’ve seen emerging is much more organised. It is where people have the intention of reporting news, but it’s done by citizens outside of traditional news organisations and not for payment.

Mosireen is a media collective responsible for collating some of the most iconic videos of the Egyptian revolution. It is one of the most popular nonprofit channels in the world after just to 4 months of being on YouTube. This comes at a time when citizen journalism is playing an increasingly important role in the Arab world in both newsgathering and challenging official media and state discourses attempting to silence the revolutionaries.

Libna Darwish is one of the founding members and she had this to say about Mosireen:

“The success of Mosireen shows how people need a different type of journalism and how the new form is gaining more and more support. It is not about being a professional filmmaker, it is not about editing. The footage is from people who are volunteers and are not making money out of it. A lot of the footage is donated by people who’ve risked their lives at the scene and are corroborating to make this network of citizen journalists, who want to share their experiences and get the information out.”

Realising they were only getting to people with Internet connections they set up outdoor cinemas so that everyday people could witness what was going on through the stories of these citizen journalists. This led to others standing up and sharing their stories, which in turn became part of the films they continue to distribute.

It’s a story that being repeated throughout the Arab world, with special significance in Syria which has blocked traditional journalists from entering so most of the reporting that is coming out of there at the moment is from ordinary citizens risking their lives to get the story of what is happening. The country, ruled by Bashar al-Assad since 2000, has also been the site of the most brutal crackdowns against protesters. Syrians and the rest of the world have been watching video from a single source: YouTube.

Another citizen journalist site I love is the Kibera News Network in Kenya, started in 2010. It is run by 16 young citizen video journalists – all young Kenyan filmmakers – recording the news and stories as they happen from their perspective. All the videos are uploaded on YouTube as well as their own website. They get stories from local sources and encourage people to SMS in stories because Africa does not huge uptake of smart phones yet.

Content is very varied: from job security issues, to reporting fires or train accidents, as well as cultural events and political activity. There are stories on how two young men have turned to a somewhat unusual, for Kibera, employment: they own and work at a beauty salon, providing services such as manicures as well as hairstyling, to stories on open sewage trenches and high population density resulting in communicable diseases spreading quickly.

Citizen Journalism is also making inroads here and in the US as witnessed through the Ocuppy Movement.

NY Times writer and blogger Nicholas Kristof had this to say about protesters and the media during the Occupy Wall Street protests:

[H]aving people shooting videos everywhere provides a useful level of accountability. A lot of people including me were really taken aback by the videos of police violence during Occupy Wall Street. A decade ago nobody would have known about that because there wouldn’t have been a reporter there and even if someone did write about it, it wouldn’t have been that dramatic.

One of the challenges of breaking news through a medium like twitter for us as news consumers is the ability for us to sort through what is news and what isn’t.

Particularly when you have events like earthquakes and tsunamis you get these large amounts of citizen reports coming out from there and it is hard for people to verify what is actually happening. And there have been false rumours that have been started to twitter. I don’t think anyone find that surprising.

It is also led to get another role in journalism with the undertaken by journalists and Ciit J’s alike in the curation of twitter. Andy Carvin (@acarvin) is probably the most famous curator – he works for NPR which is National Public Radio in America because is not a journalist himself.

Carvin perfected the art of finding sources to following the Middle Eastern uprising. He would question the information that was being tweeted and make sure that he can verify anything he sent on. At one time in libya’s uprising Carvin tweeted 1200 times in 24 hours for many the only trusted source of information that that was happening in Libya at the time.

We’ve also seen newsrooms use storify to put together information that citizens have put out there and publish them on their news sites. Storify lets you collate tweets into a story structure – first tweets at the top, where Twitter reads backwards if you like. If you visited any Australian news site recently you might have noticed Storify.

This brings us to the very interesting intersection of news rooms and citizen journalism.

What role do citizen journalists play in traditional media? And if we are part of media then do we have the same responsibilities as media?

As my good friend Margaret Simons points out “journalism is a practice not a profession”

Most newsrooms have some integration of citizen journalism in their daily news gathering. I’m sure you have noticed on Twitter or Facebook or even up on a news website call outs for tips, scoops or pictures about a specific story.

But many in ways I think newsrooms regard to citizen journalism as the competition. It isn’t.

There are a large number of benefits that can come from further integration of citizen reporting in news rooms, not the least of which is that people feel genuinely engaged with the news when they contribute to it.

There are some things though that citizen news gathering has over traditional news rooms that can’t be ignored. This is a quote from Clay Shirky:

“There are three advantages to citizen video over what is produced by trained press. The first is that the first people on the scene of an event are usually citizens, so it is better for speed. The second is that there are more citizens than press, so it is better for coverage. The third is that it is harder to control citizens than press, so it is better for free speech.”

I think in the examples I have given you go some way to prove this.

It is interesting then to see The Guardian recently announce it is going to heavily invest in citizen journalism as it’s future hope.

It also announced a few months that it would be moving to a digital only news organisation in the future, so it would not have any print presence. As one of the older more established newspapers that fairly significant.

It’s set up what it has called “open journalism.”

Here’s a quote from The Guardian announcement on open journalism and the move to digital first:

[It] is a collaboration between journalists within the building and experts out of the building … who are experts because they care about the subject matter as much as we do. They don’t have to be called professor.
“I think like a lot of industries, you start off as the accidental manufacturer. Presses came along and we distributed content that way. We are now very clear that we have a digital first strategy. We are much more concerned about telling stories than we are about the platform.
“Once you decouple the consumer from the platform, it [the platform] becomes less important. From a commercial point of view, we absolutely can see a time when there will not be as many newspapers on the high street.”

The first really interesting thing The Guardian did was open it’s news list.

A news list is a papers “sacred document” for the day that contains all the stories they are covering.

On The Guardian now you can see a live account of the plans in the form of the daily newslist kept by their editors. It provides a glimpse into the scheduled announcements, events and speeches that make up the news day. You are also be able to view what the editors think about the stories by reading their updates on Twitter with the hashtag #opennews. They also tweet conversations they have about the day’s news, story ideas we get from our correspondents and the latest information on stories that we get during the day from their twitter account @guardianworld.

“We won’t quite show you everything. We can’t tell you about stories that are under embargo or, sometimes, exclusives that we want to keep from our competitors, but most of our plans will be there for all to see, from the parliamentary debates we plan to cover to the theatre we plan to review. We reserve the right to stick to our guns, but would love to know what you think.”

It was first done in October 2011 as a two-week experiment, but has continued on from there.

Every week The Guardian also publishes a list of how to get involved in the news, proactively encouraging citizens to get involved.

They’ve undertaken projects with citizen journalists – sending photographers who captured moments from London riots to go back and take pictures months later.

I thought I would go through some iPhone apps that aid reporting from the field, as you never know when you might need them.

Here’s a list from Ohio University’s Society Professional Journalists Blog:

iTalk: From Griffin Technology, this recording app for iPhones or iPads allows you to select from different levels of recording quality and send the file via email, Dropbox, or iTunes.
Flipboard: Converts social media content into a personalized, digital magazine on your iPhone or iPad, and can be used to keep news streams in one location.
HootSuite or TweetDeck: These social media dashboards help you organize social media content. HootSuite works on iPhone and iPad, Android, Blackberry, and Keitai, and TweetDeck works on iPhone and Android..
Police Scanner: Access real-time emergency alerts on your iPhone, and record and save events.
AP Stylebook: Consult the AP Stylebook from the field on your iPhone or Blackberry.
Evernote: Create notes and keep track of story ideas from the field. The app is available for iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Windows phones.
iMovie: Organize, edit, and share video stories from the field.

Of course if we are breaking stories we need to take responsibility for verifying it. I think one of the best ways to do this is to make yourselves familiar with the social media tools you use and to the people you engage with. Learn who to trust

Nothing disappoints me than journalists just following other journalists, I think they’re missing out on understanding who their potential sources are and who they should trust. It takes time and skill.

I have two rules, for my own use:

1.Read links before you RT.
2. Correct tweets – and delete incorrect ones from the stream. (They can be RT amplifying the error.)

In summary, I think Jay Rosen put it perfectly when he said:

Journalism gets better the more people doing it.

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