The Good, the Bad and the Citizen Journalist
Citizen journalism is certainly not all roses. In fact it’s a very mixed bouquet and some of the flowers smell – like lilies when they start to go off. There are innumerable success stories and equally publicised ‘citizen journalism will bring about the downfall of the world’ stories. For anyone against citizen journalism there is plenty of evidence to call or click upon – happy slapping videos, untruthful wikis, news hoaxes.
The parents of a happy slapping victim in a video uploaded to YouTube spoke out about the corrupting influence of the internet. Her father even declared that, “MySpace is the Anti-Christ for children!” But to blame the web is like saying a park should be closed down because someone has been assaulted within its boundaries.
This turns people’s attention to regulation. If it can’t be stopped then it can damn well be regulated – so the traditionalists might think. What should be regulated? How can it be regulated? Should regulation vary depending upon the website/country? The debate rages on.
To me, citizen journalism can be loosely separated into opinion and news-based output. Spaces where citizens can upload news content –‘at the scene’ videos and pictures or personal accounts – I believe should be regulated. Or you could end up with this kind of problem. We all have a responsibility to make sure that news comes as close to truth as possible.
Opinion, however, is an interpretation of what has happened and I don’t believe it can be or should be policed. Blogs and forums are at the heart of opinion-based journalism. While some may be filled with expert insight, others may be a series of lies. People should be encouraged to question everything they read. I don’t see how this is a bad lesson to learn. It’s also arguably easier to explore all sides of a story on the web than anywhere else…
What is often forgotten is that the web is alive. If something incorrect is published on the web then it’s likely to get caught out by the hundreds of other users who have expert knowledge over the topic in question. Jemima Kiss in her article, Citizen journalism: dealing with dinosaurs, recalls how Dan Rather lost his job at CBS after a story he broadcast about Bush’s war record was found to be incorrect by the internet-using public. To be exact, a group of right wing bloggers and an expert on typewriter fonts pointed out the mistake. Jeff Jarvis defends citizen journalism in his blog referring to this self-correcting nature of the web.
On the web, there is a wealth of expertise available in all sorts of subjects, from typewriter fonts to High School Musical (I personally would not mess with the latter). Professional journalists can use this expertise to help them or, God forbid, make them check their stories more thoroughly.
The internet is all of it – I hate to use the flower analogy again but, yes, it really is the mixed bouquet. I would rather be exposed to it all: opinon, user generated news, even happy slapping than to lose this new found freedom. We are not the ones with the real worries. It’s those places in the world that do not have an open debate, where free speech is not a given, that do. Groundviews, a Sri Lankan citizen journalism website, was launched in December 2006. In Sri Lanka, human rights have been bypassed for decades and such a site is seen as a gift loaded with democratic potential.
Rather than wasting our energy on internal discussions about citizen journalism we should be trying to expand what is a currently a very limited conversation. We need to be engaging with citizens in countries where freedom of speech is not taken for granted, encouraging those in our own country who aren’t partaking, tackling opposition to net neutrality and trying to provide laptops to the deprived (there are some who are trying). We need to stop whining and start looking at the bigger picture.
