The internet: the natural way for news to happen
My friend Jo White (@Mediamum) recently asked for my thoughts on why citizen journalism matters as she’s teaching a class on the subject. So here are some of my views for your perusal and comments:
The internet is the natural environment for news to take place.
Traditional Western news organisations exist as they do because the distribution of news was previously limited by its means of production and the dynamics of capitalism. You needed a printing press, a TV license etc. to produce and distribute news.
To counter those constraints and deal with the enormity of that responsibility, we structured largely false, and “ideal”, notions of what was news and how that was reported. We developed terms such as newsworthiness and imparted notions of objectivity to sort through the practicalities of “telling stories” to the masses.
News became big business and news organisations became big corporations. All of this was not a bad thing in itself, but born out of social constructs and economic necessity.
The internet has changed this. The barrier to broadcast is essentially access to the internet (not discounting some social challenges), but while this remains a problem in some third-world countries, the existence of large mobile infrastructure is quickly overcoming at least the technical problems.
For me, the impact of this change was made evident during the second-Iraqi conflict, when a group of local bloggers set about writing what was happening from cafes and with limited internet access. Traditional journalists were often unable to go out and report on the situation in any meaningful way because they were compromised by having to go out with the US army or simply unable to leave their hotels for fear for their safety. In fact, it was were the term hotel journalism was coined.
What the Iraqi bloggers were able to do was report on what was really going on in a way that traditional media could not. Their opinions were better informed, personal (free from the falsehood of objectivity) and told the news to the world in a way that could not be done through traditional journalism.
Modern news rooms are somewhat remnant of the situation in Iraq – reporters are often tied to their desks and beats with little time to get out and discover what is happening outside of what is fed to them through sources and press releases. While there are exceptions, this is the harsh reality of the costs and time it takes to write for a large news organisation and the internet has only added to these pressures.
Those on the street now have the ability to report directly on what is happening around them. Our own personal experiences of our neighborhood will always be better informed than that of a reporter, surely? (Hence I was inspired to start the norg.)
News is no longer limited to the false dichotomy of “one side versus another” – there are often many views/sides/opinions to a story and as long as all have equal opportunity and access to sharing that information then we can leave the shackles of control media behind. Open comments on news stories is an important step in the right direction (and also Citizen Journalism).
Lastly, “citizen journalism” is not the best term, but possibly the easiest to understand. I think we are all news makers. Journalism has never been an official profession, but a prescribed name for a skill set many people can learn and contribute to outside of mainstream media.
Also the term Citizen Journalism does not account for the fact that many experts now have access to audiences.
Really what we are seeing is an age of hyper-connected news as opposed to that we have only been drip-fed. We are all news-makers engaging in what is only natural to us – telling our stories.
Photo shared under creative commons.