Citizen Journalism and Traditional Media Collide

By:  Jeremy M. Vought

Courtesy:  Wikipedia

Johannes Gutenberg developed the printing press in the 1400’s.  For hundreds of years, communicators have relied on the press to pass information.  It revolutionized written communication and communication across the masses.  Throughout generations, only a select number of elite people had access to such technology:  Book publishers, newspaper outlets, and governments.  These ‘gatekeepers’ controlled how and what information was published.  The digital revolution has shattered all that.  Today, with the help of inexpensive handheld technology and social media platforms across the Internet, regular citizens are taking the keys from the gatekeepers of information and are becoming citizen journalists.

Technology has driven the vehicle of societal change into this new era of journalism.  Three innovations particularly fueled this growing movement:  Web 2.0 and social media websites, cell phones and smartphones, and high-quality-low-cost camera gear.  These three things combined laid a functional foundation that is allowing citizens to ‘make the news.'

Courtesy:  The Cole Papers

The digital revolution in photojournalism took hold in the early to mid 1990’s.  One of the first digital cameras primarily built and marketed for journalists was made through a partnership between Kodak, Nikon, and the Associated Press.  The NC2000 (NC for news camera) cost more than $17,000 and was only a 1.3-megapixal sensor (Dunleavy).  Today, anybody can run down to his or her local electronics story and purchase a 12-megapixal camera for under $200 that also records video.  High-quality cameras once only reserved for photojournalists with the backing of deep-pocketed news corporations are now available to everyday citizens.   

Courtesy:  Apple

      The rise of the cellular phone, and more recently smartphones, has greatly contributed to this new media landscape.  According to the Mobile Factbook 2012, at the end of 2011 there were roughly six billion mobile subscribers worldwide (Portio Research).  Today’s cell phone is an incredibly powerful tool for citizen journalism that can empower the beholder.  Nearly every phone has a camera, which means nearly everyone with a cell phone in his or her pocket or purse has the ability to document something of interest.  For example, the newest Apple iPhone 5 has a built-in 8-megapixel camera – 8 times the quality of the NC2000.  In addition, today’s cell phones also have the ability to access the Internet.  This is allowing citizens around the world to literally document news and break it as it is happening.  Information in today’s technology landscape is instant.  No longer does the world need to wait for the traditional photojournalist to photograph a news event, travel back to his or her editor, vet it through the newsroom, and release an image on the Internet.  For a majority of many developing nations, the cell phone is their citizens’ only portal to access the Internet, which will be an important note when we look at the how important the cell phone and mobile Internet made and is making a difference in the Arab Spring.  In Egypt alone, roughly 70% of the people’s only access to the Internet is via mobile technology (MobiThinking).
      While this new technology allowed everyday people to document the world around them, they still lacked the distribution method and ‘soap-box’ to share this with the world and their local communities.  This need brings us to the third innovation that helped spawn the citizen journalist revolution.  Web 2.0 and various social media websites have transformed and increased the voice of the individual.  Web 2.0 is the term that describes any collaboration type involvement on the Internet.  Instead of just viewing content on a regular website, Web 2.0 sites are designed around user generated content, sharing, commenting, and the ease of publishing content.  Some Web 2.0 sites are blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and YouTube. Most of these were all launched and became popular between 2000 and 2005. This new web infrastructure provides the platform for individuals to have a voice like no other time in history.

Courtesy:  Website Boston

These three innovations helped raise the blogger to the public sphere.  According to Nielsen data, there were some 35 million blogs worldwide in 2006.  Five years later, in 2011, the number sky rocketed to more than 181 million blogs (Nielsen Wire).  While traditional media were having a one-way conversation with the public, bloggers and citizen journalists could create and foster two-way and multi-way communications with audiences to create collaborative news and opinions.  Throughout this rise, traditional journalists have been critical over the objectivity and authority of bloggers, though time and certain events are helping to shatter that mentality.

Courtesy:  Top Rank Blog

In 2005, bloggers gained considerable authority when a blogger was issued the first press pass from President George W. Bush’s White House (Robinson).  Today, roughly eight bloggers make up the small circle of roughly 50 journalists in the White House Press Corps.  The Department of Defense also regularly invites bloggers into a Bloggers Roundtable where military-related life and military-related family bloggers cover certain aspects of the U.S. Armed Forces.

More than 20 million people blog in America (Robinson).  According to the report State of the Blogosphere 2011, more than 40% of those bloggers in the U.S. consider themselves professionals - many of whom make some sort of money blogging (Technorati), though another subset of citizen journalism is regular individuals simply sharing news, photos and videos with their followers on social media – particularly on Twitter.

Courtesy:  Twitter Blog

Twitter is credited with ‘breaking’ news off and on since it first started in 2006.  This is exactly why the traditional media follow Twitter.  They can be alerted to news and, in turn, break their own stories via print, broadcast, or online.  Take, for example, the US Airways crash January 15, 2009 on the Hudson River in New York City.  The ‘Twitterverse’ was full of individual eyewitness accounts and photos 15 minutes before the traditional media ever reported the incident to audiences (Beaumont), though it could be rationalized that the majority of people still found out the news via the mainstream media – Twitter simply provided the first images and news tips.

In the not too distant past, the media held a certain amount of power and authority.  One of the ways they exercised and still do exercise that power is through a term known as ‘gatekeeping.’  As explained in Social News, Citizen Journalism and Democracy, the role of the information gatekeeper is a part of the traditional media’s DNA process of creating news and deciding what will be the day’s news:

The production of news routinely implies a complex and multilayered chain of communication and sense making events, issues and ideas will be subject to the influence of various ‘filters’ or ‘gatekeepers’ (sources, journalists, sub-editors) before reaching their public destination. What blogging, citizen journalism and social news sites yield are new possibilities for citizen participation at various points along those chains of sense-making that shape news – not only new possibilities for citizens to ‘break’ news. (Goode)

       In today’s information rich society, many consumers of news don’t want to be told what to think.  Instead, as one journalist interview revealed, the consumers want the information to make up their own conclusions.  This is a major shift in the authority of traditional journalism:

The new media world is a massive paradigm shift in which once the media was the center of the universe and now the user is the center of the universe, and when that happened the nature of storytelling and what we do changed. ... Most younger readers/users these days tell me they don’t want authority. They want information and they will make up their minds. They want to be the authority. (Robinson)

      Social media now allow sources – subject matter experts, celebrities, people in authority, and everyday citizens – to reach and communicate directly with an audience.  No longer must they rely on journalists to cover their story, use their quote, or broadcast their side of an issue.  They simply log in and type in a line or two to communicate (Ingram).  That’s one reason why the traditional media refer to Twitter more than any other social media platform in their reporting (Bennett).  Since anyone can essentially become ‘viral’ – Internet celebrity – there is a paradigm shift in the distribution of media, which was once only reserved for the traditional media through TV, radio, and print. This is the “democratization of distribution,” according to Om Malik:

The distribution, which had been in the hands of a few large media conglomerates, was suddenly available to everyone. Today anyone, even talentless acts such as Rebeca Black can upload their video to YouTube and become instant celebrities. Justin Bieber, too, is a product of this channel-less revolution.

       Citizen journalism and the tools to which it flourishes have taken many of the gatekeeper’s keys through this ease of distribution.  Since there are more ‘voices’ out there now, the public must learn to vet information even better as there are potential negatives of “everyone” and “talentless acts” providing news.

       So, then, how is the traditional media reacting to this new media shift, loss of certain powers, and the rise of the citizen journalists?  On the outside, it seems like the mainstream media are embracing the changes:  CNN’siReport social/citizen journalism platform puts out assignment calls and has close to a million users after six years; open commenting on stories is available on traditional news sites; more ‘amateur’ and citizen journalism products are used in traditional mediums as source material; bloggers are on salary in the mainstream media; and, official outlets have presence on social media and mobile apps.  There are, however, areas where the mainstream media have not embraced this new culture shift:  Sky News has banned its journalists from “posting anything other than work-related content on Twitter, prevents them from breaking news through the service — and even forbids them from retweeting anything that doesn’t come from a Sky News account” (Ingram).  The Associated Press and BBC also bar its reporters from breaking news via social media as well as a host of other regulations.  While CNN iReport receives roughly 500 reports a day from citizen journalists, only a fraction of them are vetted and even fewer make it to air.  Additionally, while comments are available on their stories, journalists and other producers say they seldom check and nearly never respond (Robinson).

20 year-old citizen journalist Hamza Mahmoud Othman was shot
by a sniper in the Al Joubar neighborhood, in Homs.
Courtesy of the Doha Centre for Media Freedom

       Citizen journalism is making its largest strides on the streets in the Middle East.  The Arab Spring, started in 2011, sheds new light on the enormous importance and need for citizen journalism.  As the revolution fights on in Syria, the government there has barred journalists from entering the country.  A great information vacuum is occurring - one that civilians with cell phones are bravely filing.  "Professional journalists are often suspicious of citizen journalism.  When it came to Syria, however, even the largest new networks became wholly reliant on amateur cameramen to supply them with footage," the chief editor of Barada TV wrote in his article "Candid Cameraphone" (al-Abdeh).  While Twitter and Facebook were instrumental in rallying and organizing protestors in Egypt, You Tube is playing a vital role in exposing war atrocities and Syrian propaganda to the international community.  Thousand upon thousands of videos and images are coming out of the country even though the Syrian government is doing everything in their power to shut down social media.  Seeing the power of the Apple device, the regime even went so far as to outlaw the the iPhone to control citizen reporting (BBC).

       We are less than 10 years in this new media world.  Regular citizens are now more involved in the news process and sharing of information than ever before.  Technology like Web 2.0 and the cellphone allow communications to occur instantly.  Today, someone can record a video and share it with the world.  It's a new form of journalism - people sharing their world and idea around them.  As traditional media hold onto the structured practices of gatekeeping, citizen journalist are breaking new barriers of communication.  An absolute form of journalism, one way or another, is not the answer.  In the end, the multiple 'voices' of information between traditional journalism, citizen journalism and your neighbor on social media empowers people with information.  They all have a vital role in a common goal toward a better, more informed community.

       

  
           

Works Cited

al-Abdeh, Malik. "Candid Cameraphone." New Statesman 13 Feb. 2012: 16-16. Business Source Complete. Web. 19 July 2012.

Beaumont, Claudine. "New York Plane Crash: Twitter Breaks the News, Again." The Telegraph. N.p., 16 Jan. 2009. Web. 24 July 2012.

Bennett, Shea. "Twitter Beats Facebook (And Everyone Else) as the Most Popular Social Network Of 2011 [STUDY]." All Twitter. MediaBistro, 27 Dec. 2011. Web. 3 Aug. 2012.

"Buzz in the Blogosphere: Millions More Bloggers and Blog Readers." Nielsen Wire. N.p., 8 Mar. 2012. Web. 3 Aug. 2012.

Dunleavy, Dennis. "A Bird's View of History: The Digital Camera and the Ever-Changing Landscape of Photojournalism." The Digital Journalist. Eds. Dirck Halstead and Ronald Steinman. N.p., Feb. 2006. Web. 20 July 2012.

"Global Mobile Statistics 2012 Part B: Mobile Web; Mobile Broadband Penetration; 3G/4G Subscribers and Networks." MobiThinking, June 2012. Web. 22 July 2012.

Goode, Luke. "Social News, Citizen Journalism and Democracy." New Media & Society 11.8 (2009): 1287-305. Academic Search Complete. Web. 15 July 2012.

Ingram, Mathew. "Is It Good for Journalism When Sources Go Direct?" GigaOM. N.p., 30 Jan. 2012. Web. 30 July 2012.

Ingram, Mathew. "Sky News Joins the Anti-Social Media Brigade." GigaOM. N.p., 7 Feb. 2012. Web. 26 July 2012.

Malik, Om. "The Distribution Democracy and the Future of Media." GigaOM. N.p., 10 May 2011. Web. 31 July 2012.

Robinson, Sue, and Cathy DeShano. "‘Anyone Can Know’: Citizen Journalism and the Interpretive Community of the Mainstream Press." Journalism 12.8 (2011): 3-10. EDS Foundation Index. Web. 17 Jan. 2012.

"State of the Blogosphere 2011." Technorati. N.p., 4 Nov. 2011. Web. 2 Aug. 2012.

"Syria 'Bans iPhones' over Protest Footage." BBC, 2 Dec. 2011. Web. 31 July 2012.

"Worldwide Mobile Market." Mobile Factbook 2012. N.p.: Portio Research Ltd., n.d. 7-7. Apr. 2012. Web. 22 July 2012. .