Slashdot Mirror
Participatory Journalism
J.D. Lasica has written a three-part series on participatory journalism. He put a lot of emphasis on video netcasting, which I think has a lot of years to go before it's actually important in any sense due to the slow growth of broadband in the U.S., but overall it's a good analysis of trends in interactivity.
Good point, it takes the emphasis off of credibility, but in a good way. I think anyone who has ever worked a day in their life knows that there's really no drawn lines in the world (i.e. a controlled system), just human tendencies to perform x% of their job and 100-x% of what feels good at the time. Let's face it, Humans are moody. I know half the crap I see and read I don't take too seriously because Humans are behind it all. True, blogs and other free-forms of communication are more likely going to be filled with misinformation, but at least no one gets fooled into believing it's the gospel truth.
Recently I wrote an article on how one might create a collaborative editorial system where the personal bias of the editors could be filtered out. Anyone interested can check it out here.
We ran an article about blogs, participatory journalism and emerging technology from a panel discussion at this year's annual Canadian Association of Journalists (inter)national conference.
The panelists agreed that blogging and other forms of particpatory journalism don't automatically qualify as journalism, but they did say that it CAN be journalism if journalistic standards and principles are applied.
One of the more interesting comments was from technology journalist David Akin, who said that experiments that enlist blogging citizens with camera phones to send their photos to news sites may be cool and fun and interesting, but it's not news by longshot, mainly because they lack the professional journalistic skills to identify what qualifies as news.
For some time, I've participated in a couple parts of a widespread participatory journalism project. Since participatory journalism can be anything from an open publishing system with editor collectives, to someone's soapbox with a comment system, it's a bit hard for anyone to call themself an expert or something. With that said, I'd like to toss in a few thoughts drawn from my own experiences.
First, I haven't read the comments, but I suspect more than a few people will cry "but what about objectivity???" Objectivity does not exist. Everyone, every reporter, every editor, approaches a story from an angle, whether a personal one derived from years of experience, or a collective one that comes from economic or political demands. It is essential that independent writers report and analyse truthful information without exaggeration, but there must be an open acknowledgement that different sources will skew descriptions based on their own opinions. One need only contrast, say, the Toronto Star, the National Post, and Socialist Worker's description of the same events to recognize this reality.
I find that the best articles, in corporate, state, and independent media report the facts, then provide analysis based on the writer's stated or perceivable mental framework. Journalism seems at its best when the writers go beyond reporting, placing events in a greater context. Obviously, context can be selective, which makes the necessity of varied sources even more important. Falsehoods and exaggerations need to be called out and corrected. However, the focus on "objectivity" has become a fetish that very few news services really pay anything more than lip service to. Far too often, objectivity is used as a cover for inserting yet another editorial viewpoint to an article or deleting a disfavoured view (or even an uncomfortable fact). The most obvious example of this that pops into my head is Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan, and you can probably come up with many more.
Second, open-publishing sites will be just as influenced by concerns outside of pure reporting as the New York Times or the Islamic Republic News Agency. Editorial collectives or individual editors will post features based on an overall point of view. I doubt anyone will ever see a feature praising neoconservatives on Ontario Indymedia; likewise, I will never expect to see a headline praising anarchists on Free Republic. If there are forums or open-publishing systems, the collective/editors will likely retain some kind of control over the system. Some kind of editing capability is necessary to deal with spam, flames disguised as news, repeated postings, false info, legally questionable things (some sites will be more anal than others regarding legalities), etc. I've found that comments are best left untouched, since the debate can be useful and enlightening, such as many high-score posts here.
I've participated in two editorial collectives. One tended toward a freewheeling attitude, allowing practically anything that wasn't empty, an advertisement, a repeat, or blatantly inciteful. We almost never hid comments to articles, barring a nasty incident following the Netanya suicide bombing in 2001 and the Israeli military operation that followed it, where some knob decided to post anti-Jewish imagery as comments to every article on the newswire. The jerk, stopped, eventually, and the flood of crap that polluted the newswire helped spark a discussion about reorganizing the site and the abilities of the newswire clerks.
This leads to another point, regarding freedom of speech. Free speech does not mean every nutbar and arsewad can post whatever crap they want and cry "censorship" when it is removed. Even sites operated by anarchist collectives will have rules, since "anarch" translates as "no leaders," not "no rules". However, I've found that the most satisfying sites have an open membership policy. Anyone who is willing to put in the effort can join the edit
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Do you think this means that traditional media is being diluted? Anyone and everyone has an opinion on current events. It used to be the case that you could trust the traditional media (newspapers, tv news etc) to bring you a responsible, independant portayal of current events, because they had pride in doing so, and being better at it than the other guy (ok, I might be being a little naive here).
:)
The recent conflict in Iraq has highlighted, in my view, the fact that this isn't necessarily true any more. I saw A Lot of posts from Americans pointing out that the news coverage in the US missed out a lot of stuff that other news services (such as the bbc) put on the front page. I'm a Brit, and I tend to trust Auntie, but maybe I'm not getting the full story either. These days, if you want an accurate picture, you've got to check a few different sources, and judge them on their individual merits.
the comments on slashdot often provide far more interesting insight
I'd agree with you on this one. I do, from time to time, rtfa, but I tend to pick up the wider view from the comments. The slashdot crowd seems to cover a wide variety of viewpoints, and there's always something in the +3s that picks up on a point that I hadn't thought of.
So I guess what I'm asking is this: I don't know you. I don't personally know anyone who posts on slashdot. How do I know that you know what you're talking about? How do I know that Joe Blogger isn't full of crap? How do I know that they know any more about the subject in question than I do?
If everyone has an opinion, and everyone expresses it without the traditional 'journalistic integrity', how do you tell which source is accurate?
Discuss.
Warning: May contain nuts
I won't accept your definition of journalism as reporting what is happening. That's far too broad. I'm not practicing journalism if I write a letter to a friend describing what I did yesterday. Someone who blogs a conference they're attneding isn't practicing journalism, either.
It's foolish -- and not very important -- to expect journalists to have no opinions about the events they're reporting. If your standard of impartiality requires every journalist to report every possible slant and every potential voice on every story he writes, then you've raised a standard that is impossible to meet. You can't choose to participate in an activity and then also report on that activity as a journalist. You can write about it as a participant, or separate yourself from it and behave as a journalist, but you can't do both at the same time.
What you can expect journalists to do is to make an effort to keep their opinions out of a story, and to make an effort to present the facts as they see them. If you believe a given journalistic source -- a newspaper, a network, a station -- is deliberately slanting story selection and tone, then you may opt to go elsewhere.
Most people seem to equate "impartial" or "independent" journalism with reportage that confirms the opinions they already hold. They also seem to identify as journalism deliberately slanted outlets whose primary purpose is to sway opinion. These outlets are practicing propaganda, not jounalism. Examples abound in talk radio and on the web.
The primary reason to reject the notion that blog writing is journalism is that fact that blog writers lack editorial oversight, seldom obtain more than a single source to verify a story point (if they manage to obtain even a single source), and infuse their stories with entirely too much information about themselves.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
As you might guess, this is a somewhat contentious area within journalism
studies, although those who reject the idea are losing the battle. Before individual "participatory journalism," there was "community journalism" (where newspapers ask readers what they want to read about), but in either case the core concept is that consumers of information should be able to condition and control what they get --> interactivity.
This is 180-degrees antithetical to the old idea that there is such a thing as objective truth/news that must be presented to the audience as purely as possible and regardless of whether that audience wants to hear/read the news or likes what it hears/reads. In short form it's the debate between market-driven news vs. "watchdog" -driven news.
I'm pretty old school on this point, because the whole idea of press freedom is based on the idea that the electorate needs as much accurate information as possible from the news media, good or bad. The professionalism of the journalist and the media have been grounded in their research and commitment to separation of fact from skew -- an ideal that is often not achieved but at least is seen as a worthy goal. Traditionally, the "opinion" part of journalism has therefore been very strenuously distinguished from the reporting part of news. Commentary has been required to be very clearly labeled.
When you have "participatory journalism" -- where what gets reported, how it gets reported, and how it is interpreted is decided and mushed up altogether in random and often highly biased ways -- it really isn't journalism except in the antique definition whereby a journal is a diary -- since a blog is, precisely, a diary. The fact that it's no longer private and that the blogger may be inviting others' response doesn't make it journalism, even if some might argue that it's analogous to the editorial-plus-letters page of a newspaper.
In the case of the newspaper, the editorial is surrounded in time and space by research (theoretically) and reportage of things the readers needed to know about their world. To make it truly analogous, it would be a matter of one of the people who wrote a letter to the editor eliminating all the other pages of the paper and inviting others to write directly to him or her in public view. It may be an entirely worthy and democratic sort of a thing to do, but to call it journalism is to confer an inaccurate and inappropriate status on it... or else to change fundamentally the definition of journalism.
To put it another way: There's sitting around a Starbucks with a gang and saying a lot of people seem to be dropping dead lately and ain't that a bitch; and then there's collecting morbidity and mortality statistics from hospitals and morgues, noting how many were sick and how many were hit by cars, and THEN asking the public if they don't think that's a bitch, and what do they think should be done about it.
>The article argues that blogging is not really journalism because there is no editor.
Actually, that's a view espoused by an editor at MSNBC.com -- and one that I disagree with. I agree with mjmalone that a lot of blogging is journalism. (My personal views on the subject weren't allowed into the story.) Here are some examples of open-source journalism:
- During the peace demonstrations in February, Lisa Rein took to the streets of San Francisco and Oakland, camcorder in hand, and taped video footage of the marchers and speakers, such as Rep. Barbara Lee, Harry Belafonte and antiwar activist Ron Kovic. She posted the video on her Weblog, complete with color commentary, providing much deeper coverage of the events than a viewer would get by watching the local news.
- At technology and media conferences, such as PopTech, South by Southwest and Digital Hollywood, bloggers in the audience have reported conference events in real time, posting photographs, speaker transcripts, and summaries and analysis of key points a full day before readers could see comparable stories in the daily newspaper.
- On July 16, 2003, blogger Andy Baio reported on the tragedy in which an elderly driver plowed through the Santa Monica Farmers Market just outside Baio's office window. He had been walking down that street 20 minutes before. Baio described "the dead and dying" lying in the street and relayed first-hand reports from office co-workers who were eyewitnesses. He also posted a map of the accident scene, laid out a detailed chronology of events, and pointed to media coverage and photographs of the bloody scene.
- On Super Bowl Sunday, a 22-year-old blogger in Los Angeles named Jessica braved the freezing cold to attend a televised outdoor concert by the British group Coldplay. She came home and blogged it, giving her take on the concert and reporting the band's play list. Like hundreds of others who watched the show and wanted to learn the names of the songs played, I turned to the Internet. I came up empty when I visited abc.com and coldplay.com. But hundreds of us found them (through Google) on Jessica's blog.
Jessica probably didn't know it, but she was committing a random act of journalism. And that's the real revolution here: In a world of micro-content delivered to niche audiences, more and more of the small tidbits of news that we encounter each day are being conveyed through personal media -- chiefly blogs.
I've heard it called it participatory journalism, open-source journalism, swarm journalism, distributed journalism, and journalism from the edges. By whatever name, it refers to individuals playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, sorting, analyzing and disseminating news and information -- a task once reserved almost exclusively to the traditional news media.
I included Slashdot, Kuro5hin and Metafilter as one of the categories because this, to me, is one of the most successful examples of using readers as creators, editors and fact-checkers.
-- JD Lasica
While I agree that indie news operations would cause dissonance from readers who want to stick to the familiar (if stale) old media brands, the fact that indie sites tend to offer niche news and subjective news might work in their favor over the long term.
Indymedia, for example, offers a subjective slant to political news (just as the increasingly popular Fox News does on the other side of the political spectrum). Whether it's Guerrilla News Network, The Car Place, Theme Park Insider, Consumer World or others, all such indie news sites offer solid personal journalism and community journalism often not found on institutional news sites beholden to commercial interests.
I don't see how user participation is "dangerous because common sense would dictate, somewhere along the line information will be misconstrued." That's where the Internet community's self-correction mechanism comes into play.
A conversation may be noisier, but it's much more fulfilling than a perpetual one-way lecture from the media.
-- JD Lasica
>As for participatory journalism...well, I expect journalists to make an effort at impartiality; to watch, not participate. A participant's account might be interesting, even informative, but it won't be journalism. Merely producing information is not jouranlism.
and:
>The primary reason to reject the notion that blog writing is journalism is that fact that blog writers lack editorial oversight, seldom obtain more than a single source to verify a story point (if they manage to obtain even a single source), and infuse their stories with entirely too much information about themselves.
I've been a journalist since 1977 (having worked at various metro dailies), so I probably know a little about newsrooms and journalism. My own view is that news people ought to move away from the idea that journalism is a mysterious craft that's confined only to a select priesthood -- a black art inaccessible to the masses. We forget the derivation of the word journalist: someone who keeps an account of day-to-day events.
In a newsroom, the op-ed columnists, travel writers and home decor writers all consider themselves journalists. Dan Gillmor, tech columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, is still a journalist when he posts directly to his weblog without his posting passing through an editorial filter first -- as he does every day.
Years ago I met Frank McCulloch, a legendary editor at the Sacramento Bee and Los Angeles Times who was Saigon bureau chief for Time magazine during the Vietnam War. An ink-stained member of the old guard, McCulloch believed that journalism was a simple thing. Find the right people. Ask the right questions. Write it up. "This ain't rocket science," he liked to tell people.
Exactly. Citizens are discovering how easy it can be to play reporter and publisher. To practice random acts of journalism, you don't need a big-league publication with a slick Web site behind you. All you need is a computer, an Internet connection, and an ability to perform some of the tricks of the trade: report what you observe, analyze events in a meaningful way, but most of all, just be fair and tell the truth, as you and your sources see it.
Bloggers can do that. Few bloggers fancy themselves journalists, but many acknowledge that their blogs take on some of the trappings of journalism: They take part in the editorial function of selecting newsworthy and interesting topics, they add analysis, insight and commentary, and occasionally they provide a first-person report about an event, a trend, a subject. Over time, bloggers build up a publishing track record, much as any news publication does when it starts out.
Now, is all blogging journalism? Not by a long shot. Nor is it likely that blogging will supplant traditional media or, as some have suggested, that blogging will drive news organizations out of business. When a major news event unfolds, a vast majority of readers will turn to traditional media sources for their news fix. But the story doesn't stop there. On almost any major story, the weblog community adds depth, analysis, alternative perspectives, foreign views, and occasionally first-person accounts that contravene reports in the mainstream press.
We should move beyond the increasingly stale debate of whether blogging is or isn't journalism and celebrate weblogs' place in the media ecosystem. Blogging and traditional journalism complement each other, intersect with each other, play off one another. And sometimes blogs actually do cross the line into real journalism.
JD Lasica