New York – MSNBC invited viewers to share photos of their interactions with the late Pope John Paul II, while The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., anointed eight readers with the power to publicly criticize the newspaper’s coverage on its website.
Newspapers in Boulder and Greensboro, N.C., are even letting citizens write their own news stories – on weddings, awards, even a missing cat named Banjo. Most go on the Web, but the best of the “hyper-local” news stories get printed.
Traditional news organizations are dipping their toes in citizen journalism, engaging readers and viewers in news production with the help of the Internet, camera phones and other technologies.
Yet there’s frustrations in some circles that so-called mainstream media aren’t going far and fast enough.
Rethinking the process
“It sort of requires a rethinking of the entire traditional news process, and that’s hard for news organizations to do,” said J.D. Lasica, a veteran journalist who co-founded Ourmedia.org, where citizens freely exchange digital works. “In citizen journalism, the traditional gatekeeper role of the journalist is thrown out the window.”
Phil Noble, a political consultant who runs PoliticsOnline, held as a gold standard the South Korean alternative news site OhmyNews, whose postings by thousands of citizens have shaken up the traditional media and political establishments. It’s no surprise, he said, that such successes come from outside the media mainstream.
“OhmyNews is based on the theory that every citizen is a journalist, every voice is legitimate,” Noble said. “Traditional media begins with the premise that our voice is authoritative and our voice is better informed.”
Not that traditional media organizations, faced with declining readership, viewership and trust, aren’t thinking seriously about ways to encourage dialogue.
The topic comes up repeatedly at media conferences, including We Media, organized by The Media Center, a media think tank in Reston, Va., and held at the New York headquarters of The Associated Press, a 157-year-old news outfit.
“To have something under your banner that you don’t vouch for, that’s not in the DNA of most news organizations,” said Dan Gillmor, a former newspaper columnist who now runs Bayosphere, an independent citizen-journalism site for the San Francisco area.
Among the concerns: accuracy, reputation and liability.
“If Yahoo puts up blogs, that’s one thing. They are not making any representations,” said Larry Kramer, who heads digital operations for CBS. “We as a news organization have to live with the fact that people look at us as an organization that reports credible information.”
So while the public can submit questions and complaints to its new “Public Eye” journal, no submission gets posted without editorial scrutiny.
Contrast that with independently funded operations like Backfence, where readers in the Washington area can write on any topic. Readers can report abuse after the fact.
“We are more nimble. We are more flexible,” said Susan DeFife, Backfence’s chief executive. “We trust our audience.”
The Spokesman-Review considered a reader-submission site but shelved it because it wanted to review postings first and didn’t have enough resources. Instead, the paper pre-selected eight readers to participate in a Web journal.
“An authentic voice”
The MSNBC cable network encourages citizens to submit text, photos and video. After the pope died, for instance, the network actively sought “remembrances, eyewitness accounts and people sending us their photographs of when they had met the pope,” said Jeanne Rothermich, its vice president of interactive strategy.
“It adds an additional voice, an authentic voice,” she said.
Citizen journalism
The Denver Newspaper Agency’s hybrid Internet/print publication YourHub (at www.yourhub.com) is designed to compete for suburban newspapers’ ad revenue. It’s just one example of citizen journalism, in which average readers help provide content for a news publication.
Bias
An irreverent culture and lifestyle magazine co-owned by E.W. Scripps Co. and Media News Group.
MyMileHighNews.com
Owned by Mile High Newspapers Inc., which publishes four weekly Jefferson County newspapers.
MyTown.DailyCamera.com
The Boulder Daily Camera’s equivalent of YourHub.com.
Aurora Publishing Co., Evergreen Newspapers Inc.
Suburban newspapers that have said they are looking at launching similar sites or adding more blogs and interactive features to their websites.
Source: Denver Post research
