Wednesday, July 8, 2009

AnnArbor.com suggests tutorials for "citizen" journalism

The latest post on AnnArbor.com may signal what they will rely on for the future.
Posted by at

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is easy for Ms. Huffington to talk about this, she owns and operates one of the most popular and profitable sites that employs citizen journalists. A site that collects citizen journalists with "names" from Alec Baldwin to Cal Thomas.

Journalism has always included opinion, but in roles separate from reporter.

Now the role of reporter has been changed to observer.

With our Twitter acccounts and camera phones and the Web, each person can now become a citizen journalist, millions of observers to help make the world a little smaller.

Citizen journalism relies on a group of people that will include some without ethics or boundaries.

With technology's ability to alter video and photographs, we will all have to wonder about the motivation and ethics behind each citizen journalist.

In the end, it is a sad reality for those who believed that reporters should follow certain specific rules and guidelines, but it is the new reality.

Advertising, which is the main source of revenue, will become irrelevant. Why should I read an ad about Home Depot's latest sales on one of a zillion blogs when I can just go to Home Depot.com.

It is the end of news as a money making company.

A few years from now somebody will come up with a plan to apply guidelines and ethics to the citizen journalists reporting on everything from neighborhood housefires to assasinations.

For those who believed that news gathering was a career, this is the death knell. We are all news gatherers now, citizen journalists, observers of the world and our neighborhood.

We can all share the information and we can all access that information.

09 July, 2009 11:38
inky said...

What troubles me about citizen journalism is that rolling cell phone video and Twitter feeds without context are just that ... rolling cell phone video and Twitter feeds.

Even during the recent uprising in Iran, while everyday citizens uploaded the horrific images in the streets in Tehran, real journalists still were giving context to the story by interviewing Middle East experts, diplomats, academics, etc.

Remember when journalists weren't allowed to accept free stuff that they were writing about? Well, bloggers take everything that isn't nailed down, from tin foil to shavers, coffee makers and even plasma TVs. Rules? What rules?

While word-of-mouth is a very powerful tool, how objective do you think a blogger will be when he/she gets a $3,000 TV for reviewing the product?

At the community level, how will we know that the "citizen journalist" writing about a local restaurant doesn't have a financial or other personal interest in the establishment? Or that school board coverage isn't influenced by personal bias by the free contributor?

Nobody does anything for nothing.

10 July, 2009 11:03

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)