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Is This the Future of News?
WirePosted points us to a story discussing the future of news reporting. For over a year, CNN has been accepting user-generated news stories and posting the best of them for all to see. Earlier this week, CNN handed over the reins of iReport.com, allowing unfiltered and unedited content from anyone who cares to participate, provided it adheres to "established community guidelines". Analysts point to the amateur footage from the Virginia Tech shootings and the Minnesota bridge collapse as an example of the capabilities of distributed reporting. Will this form of user-driven reporting (with which we are well acquainted) come to challenge or supplant traditional new broadcasting?
... but HELL no.
"Will this form of user-driven reporting (with which we are well acquainted) come to challenge or supplant traditional new broadcasting?"
This can be done for free. That doesn't sell advertising. CNN et al. would never let that happen. Instead they're encapsulating the user generated stuff within their own domain where they can use it to support their ad money generating bread and butter. Not embedding this stuff within their own output would be more of a threat.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
This sounds fairly similar to Newsvine, a site that was launched a few years ago for the purpose of community-driven reporting. Since then, it has been acquired by MSNBC, and several of the more prominent submitters there have either been interviewed or actually done some reporting on MSNBC. Killfile, one of the members there was in or near Blacksburg, VA when the school shootings happened last year. Thanks to his contacts at the school, he was able to post up-to-the-minute reports of exactly what was going on, while the other news outlets were busy trying to get people down there (which takes several hours since it's an out-of-the-way hamlet). His professionalism in that and other instances have made him one of the biggest assets there. Oh yeah, and Newsvine also shares the ad revenue with its submitters, too. It's a great community.
One can only hope that this is the future of news. News nowadays is nothing but pundits and propaganda. Individuals have their opinions too, but they're not professional spin machines. Any bias will probably be much more obvious to people with broken bullshit detectors. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Depending on your political point of view, you might think I'm referring specifically to MSNBC, Fox, or CNN. Fact is, I'm talking about all of them.
I don't really get this elitism when it comes to the press. Why is it that somebody with a video camera of first-person experience is considered a monkey? Why are the highly-paid monkeys a thousand miles away, who are taking their lines from teleprompters more qualified than the monkey who was there? Because there might be grammar mistakes? Not everyone is an English major, but that doesn't make them a monkey.
When I can a.) call the White House and get a serious answer to a serious question, and b.) when I have a substantial amount of your trust that I'm telling you the truth, then I can do what big media does.
Without those, my story about the alien spacecraft in my backyard is equal to my story about the White House press conference.
The examples of citizen journalism cited (9/11, a bridge collapse) are about eyewitness accounts. Taking a picture of an event you happen to stumble into is hardly journalism.
When it comes to real in-depth news reporting, i-reporting can never, never replace professional news outlets. Solid reporting requires time, know-how, resources and money.
For example, the biggest story of the day is Kosovo declaring independence from Serbia. Tell me how that story can be researched, shot and written and presented by the average person. And for free? Yes, they can get reaction to the story. But putting it in context is entirely different.
There is much bias, sensationalism and broadcast "journalists" who are no more than pretty faces or loudmouth know-it-alls. Still, there are many real reporters out there doing real reporting. We will always need them.
First, I think you will find many people (myself included), who have much more respect for PRINT journalists than TELEVISION journalists. It has been observed (on C-SPAN, don't have the reference unfortunately) that evening news typically rips stories from the pages of that morning's New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.
Second, while I will concede that some rather trivial local affairs (e.g. the iron chef competition at the county fair) could be covered adequately by "citizen journalists," real INVESTIGATIVE reporting (which lies at the heart of the First Amendment protection of the Press) is very difficult, very time consuming, and very expensive. It is unlikely that the general public will ever be able to break meaningful stories on subjects like Watergate, warrantless wiretapping, or Enron. The reasons for this are manifold, and are at least in part articulated by Scott Gant ("We're All Journalists Now"):
i) The working Press have special access privileges (e.g. priority seating in courtrooms, embedded reporting in wartimes, etc.) that must be limited out of physical necessity. They also receive privileged treatment that would be financially impractical if doled out to everyone (e.g. no-cost Freedom of Information Act requests).
ii) To understand subjects like Enron in even a moderately sophisticated manner requires devoting one's life to their study, for weeks, months, or even YEARS. Since the vast majority of the non-Press have day jobs, this is all but impossible.
iii) The Press rely heavily on confidential sources, not necessarily to provide substantive information (certainly not without fact-checking) but certainly to provide a starting point for future information. Such sources confide in the Press because of a long tradition of confidentiality and respect by members of the Press; indeed, reporters have gone to prison for refusing to disclose their sources. Additionally, confidential sources - who very well could be breaking the law by talking to reporters - may have a degree of trust that a reporter will not disclose information that is unduly personally damaging or that would materially harm the national interest. It is unlikely that Daniel Ellsberg would have leaked the Pentagon Papers to his hairdresser. (And if anyone reading this does not know the name Daniel Ellsberg, for the love of God pick up a history book.)
iv) No matter what pundits may say, journalists at major newspapers take great pains to be unbiased. (Do not confuse the opinion pages with the news pages; in good newspapers there is NO crosstalk between the two.) If you don't believe me, look at the news sections of the Wall Street Journal or the Christian Science Monitor. Neither neoconservativism (abundant in the editorial's of the former) nor religion (built into the charter of the latter) creep into the news in either. Similarly, the New York Times - bastion of editorial liberalism - always takes care to give all sides of an issue voice in a news article. While blogs and websites DO exist with a similar level of impartiality, they are few and far between. It simply is not the way of the blogger (or the human in general).