Mark Glaser
What is Citizen Journalism? The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others. For example, someone might write about a city council meeting on a blog or in an online forum. Or they could fact-check a newspaper article from the traditional media and point out factual errors or bias on their blog. Or they might snap a digital photo of a newsworthy event happening in their town and post it online. Or they might videotape a similar event and post it on a site such as YouTube.
All these might be considered acts of journalism, even if they don’t go beyond simple observation at the scene of an important event. Because of the wide availability of so many excellent tools for capturing live events – from tiny digital cameras to videophones – the average citizen can now capture the news and distribute it globally, an act that was once the province of established journalists and media companies.
There is some controversy over the term citizen journalism, because many professional journalists believe that only a trained journalist can understand the rigors and ethics involved in reporting the news. And conversely, there are many trained journalists who practice what might be considered citizen journalism by writing their own blogs or commentary online outside of the traditional journalism hierarchy.
One of the main concepts behind citizen journalism is that traditional media reporters and producers are not the exclusive center of knowledge on a subject – the audience knows more collectively than the reporter alone. Now, many of these traditional media outlets are trying to harness the knowledge of their audience either through comments at the end of stories they post online or by creating citizen journalist databases of contributors or sources for stories. Plus, many online newspapers and broadcast outlets ask their audience to send in on-the-scene video reports when a hurricane hits a coastal town or any other breaking news event happens in their locality.
To better understand citizen journalism, we will need to view it in the context of history. This chapter will look at the history of citizen journalism before the Internet; efforts to come up with alternative terminology to the oft-maligned phrase “citizen journalism”; examples of citizen journalism over the years; how political coverage has been shaped by citizen journalism; and the rise of hyper-local news and its many forms.
There’s a common expression: “If you look in the dictionary for such-and-such definition, you should see a picture of so-and-so.” Well, if you look in the dictionary for the term citizen journalism, you should see a picture of Dan Gillmor. Gillmor wrote the first blog at a newspaper website, while he was a technology columnist at the San Jose Mercury News; wrote the seminal book, We the Media, on the subject of grassroots media; and later ran the Center for Citizen Media, a joint project of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Later, Gillmor became the director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
In We the Media, Gillmor traces the roots of citizen journalism to the founding of the United States in the eighteenth century, when pamphleteers such as Thomas Paine and the anonymous authors of the Federalist Papers gained prominence by printing their own publications. Further advances such as the postal system – and its discount rates for newspapers – along with the telegraph and telephone helped people distribute news more widely.
In the modern era, video footage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s and footage of police beating Rodney King in Los Angeles in the 1980s were both captured by citizens on the scene. Plus, the rise of talk radio and even the do-it-yourself stylings of cable access TV and ’zines gave average folks the chance to share their views with a much larger audience. In newspapers, there were letters to the editor and op-ed pieces submitted by citizens, while pirate radio stations hit the airwaves in the U.S. without the permission of the Federal Communications Commission. The advent of desktop publishing on computers in the late 1980s allowed many more people to design and print out their own publications, but distribution was still limited.
With the rise of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, anyone could set up a personal home page to share their thoughts with the world. Chris Anderson, a doctoral student at Columbia University, wrote a useful timeline for citizen journalism that includes the advent of personal websites as well as the launch of the Indymedia site in 1999 after the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle that year. At Indymedia, anyone can share photos, text and video with other activists and the world. Here is how Anderson, on his blog, describes the importance of Indymedia in citizen journalism’s history:
The fact that Indymedia was dedicated to providing “real-time” information to readers as part of a larger anti-capitalist movement had several major consequences regarding its relationship to traditional journalism. First, the relaying of specific information from “newsworthy” events immediately brought Indymedia into a closer relationship with journalistic activity. Second, Indymedia was grounded in a larger, much more radical critique of the corporate (and, I argue, the professional) press than many of the “citizen journalism” projects that came before it, or after it. Third, while we can trace personal homepages back to ’zine form, Indymedia journalism is more directly linkable to the tradition of “alternative media” and “alt.journalism” that has existed for hundreds of years, ever since the start of journalism itself. This puts it far outside the mainstream, even in the American blogging world in the U.S.
Also in the 1990s, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen helped spearhead the public journalism or civic journalism movement, focused on getting mainstream reporters to serve the public. But right as that movement started to fade, the citizen journalism meme caught on after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S.
At that time in 2001, the earliest weblogs were more focused on reacting to the news and were written and read by a tech-savvy audience. But after 9/11, many ordinary citizens became on-the-spot witnesses to the attacks, and their stories and images became a major part of the story. Popular conservative political blogger Glenn Reynolds, who writes Instapundit, rose to great influence in the charged atmosphere after 9/11.
Other important milestones in the recent history of citizen journalism include eyewitness bloggers in Iraq such as Salam Pax giving stunningly detailed early accounts of the war. Plus, at the 2004 U.S. political conventions, bloggers were given press passes for the first time. Later, in 2005, the earliest photos on the scene of the London bombings on 7 July were taken by ordinary citizens with their camera phones. Mainstream media sites run by the BBC and MSNBC accepted photos, video and text reports – a practice that continues to this day among many major broadcasters and newspapers.
Citizen journalists and bloggers also helped in the worldwide reaction and relief efforts to the tsunami and flooding in Southeast Asia in late 2004 and to damage wrought by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the U.S. in 2005. They provided eyewitness reports to tragedy in locations which mainstream reporters could not reach because of the broad swathe of destruction. Some of the most striking video of the tsunami’s damage in Thailand came from tourists who were visiting the country and had video cameras with them to capture the scene.
Eventually, it wasn’t just Average Joe citizens running blogs and independent media sites online. Big-time entrepreneur billionaire Mark Cuban ran his own blog to share his viewpoints directly with the public, and celebrities helped put the group blog Huffington Post on the map – leading to a similar effort in the U.K. by the Guardian, Comment Is Free.
The terms citizen journalism and citizen journalist are not popular among traditional journalists or even the people who are doing citizen journalism at the ground level because they are imprecise definitions. Aren’t professional journalists citizens as well? What if you’re an illegal alien and not really a citizen – does that invalidate your work?
The New West website has chosen to use the term “Unfiltered” for its citizen journalism contributions, and runs the following instructions for people to contribute: “Don’t let the ‘citizen journalism’ title scare you. Your post doesn’t have to be a structured article. It can be a rant, a rave, a rhyme, a short comment, a novel – anything you feel like writing. We just want to hear what’s on your mind.”
Other media thinkers have suggested alternate terms for citizen journalism. Here’s a list of some of those terms:
grassroots journalism
networked journalism
open source journalism
citizen media
participatory journalism
hyperlocal journalism
bottom-up journalism
stand-alone journalism
distributed journalism.
Max Kalehoff, an executive at Nielsen BuzzMetrics, wrote this comment on Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog on a post about changing the term citizen journalism to networked journalism:
Why not just call journalism “journalism” – a word the citizens, amateurs, networks, distributors and professionals can understand? Journalism can be “practiced” in all sorts of ways, and by virtually anyone. You don’t even have to be a citizen or a professional; you could be a foreigner, or even an alien from outer space. But I do agree with your overall beat: journalism is not some exclusive club; it’s something that takes many forms, including all the ones you describe.
When a traditional media outlet covers a story, the editor usually assigns the story to a reporter, the reporter does the work and turns in a story that gets edited and published. But in the case of ad hoc citizen journalism, a blogger or observer might see something happening that’s newsworthy and bring it to the attention of the blogosphere or the online public. As more people uncover facts and work together, the story can snowball without a guiding editor and produce interesting results – leading to the mainstream media finally covering it and giving it wider exposure.
Here are some examples of ad hoc citizen journalism:
• Trent Lott resigns as majority leader of the U.S. Senate in December 2002 after blogs keep up pressure over a racist remark he made.
• Conservative bloggers helped discredit documents related to President Bush’s National Guard service used in an episode of “60 Minutes II” in 2004. This became known as Rathergate.
• Various people worked together online to help identify the star of the Lonelygirl15 videos on YouTube as a New Zealand actress. That included teenagers and the Los Angeles Times.
• A former Lockheed Martin engineer takes his story about security flaws with Coast Guard ships straight to YouTube after the mainstream media ignored his entreaties. Later, the Washington Post wrote about it.
• People in the ePluribus Media community make a timeline of key events around the 29 August 2005 landfall of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, with more than 500 events included, which are fact-checked and sourced by the group alone. The timeline stretched all the way until July 2006.
While the rise of citizen journalism largely happened outside of traditional media in the U.S., there are some exceptions and cases of hybrid efforts that mix the on-thescene reports from citizens with professional editing. One of the pioneering efforts in citizen journalism was the OhMyNews site in South Korea, launched in early 2000, which has become a popular mainstream news source in that Asian country. The site is a hybrid of professionally reported and citizen reported stories, with citizen journalists being paid small sums for the more popular work they do.
OhMyNews was successful in South Korea because it provided an alternative view of politics in a country that had been dominated by a conservative press. The site was an important hub of the opposition party during the December 2002 presidential election, won by Roh Moo Hyun, who gave his first post-election interview to OhMyNews.
The site has gone on to introduce a more globally focused English-language site called OhMyNews International, with nearly all its content coming from citizen journalists. In 2006, the site launched OhMyNews Japan with an influx of funding from the investment firm Softbank. But those efforts to expand have not been successful business ventures outside of Korea, and the site started to lose momentum in 2007 as other media sites started to use the same tactics that OhMyNews made famous.
In the U.S., newspaper publishers have created some of the more viable citizen media sites, from the Northwest Voice in Bakersfield, California, to the series of Your Hub sites out of Denver. Plus, Minnesota Public Radio has built a database of citizen contributors to help give reporters a more informed view of society with a project called Public Insight Journalism.
More hybrid projects have launched with paid professional editors, reporters or “network wranglers” helping to shape the story ideas while interested citizen journalists help do the research and dig up facts they know locally. Liberal political blogger Josh Marshall has launched one such effort called TPMmuckraker, and led the way reporting and using citizen journalists to cover the firings for political reasons of eight U.S. attorneys by the Department of Justice. That reporting – which included readers sifting through thousands of documents released by the government – won Josh Marshall a George Polk Award for investigative journalism, the first time a blogger had won a Polk award.
The Sunlight Foundation has also created numerous projects that combined professional editors with citizen input to help make the U.S. Congress more transparent. In 2006, the group brought together conservative and liberal bloggers in an “Exposing Earmarks” campaign to track all the legislative “earmarks” in a labor bill. These earmarks are used by members of Congress to send money to their own pet projects at home with little oversight by the public. That campaign led to the Coburn-Obama bill, a bi-partisan effort to create an online database of all earmarks on all bills before Congress. The bill was signed into law by President Bush on 26 September 2006.
During the 2008 presidential campaign in the U.S., there were many efforts to combine professional editors or producers with citizen journalist coverage. MTV hired 50 citizen journalist/videographers in 50 states to report on how the election affected those areas. The “Street Team ’08” site gave each of the citizen journalists the space to blog, post audio, photos and videos and interact with readers to decide what aspects of regional politics they should cover. The citizen journalists were paid by MTV and were given direction by veteran producers at MTV.
PurpleStates.tv also combined professional TV producers with citizen reporters, who reported on the U.S. presidential campaign during the primary season. The five citizen reporters were supposed to represent a range of political opinions, but none of them had prior on-air training before becoming the focal point of this reality-TV type series of video vignettes online. The video series ran on the New York Times website during the primaries and on the Washington Post’s website in the fall campaign.
Another hybrid effort was called “Off the Bus,” hosted by the Huffington Post group blog, and including citizen reports that were edited by professional journalists. The initial idea for the project was that hundreds of citizens would follow various candidates and report on their every move. But Huffington Post learned that getting people to do complex reporting without training was a difficult task. Marc Cooper, the editorial coordinator of Off the Bus, told PBS MediaShift:
Where we’ve had the biggest problem is assuming that untrained citizen reporters can quickly and adequately replace professional and trained reporters. We do ourselves a lot of damage if we underestimate the training and professional rigors of journalism. I’m talking about the standards and training that go into building a journalist. Journalists don’t just come off the shelf.
Though many old-school journalists have been wary about the power wielded by citizen journalists, some of the more enlightened members of the journalism elite are starting to catch on. Kenneth Neil Cukier, a technology correspondent for The Economist in London, told the OpenBusiness blog these eye-opening thoughts on citizen journalists:
I acknowledge the problems but welcome the development of the ‘amateur journalist’, akin to the ‘gentleman scientist’ of the 18th century, which did so much to advance knowledge. I believe journalism is undergoing its ‘reformational moment’. By that I mean that the Internet is affecting journalism just as the printing press affected the Church – people are bypassing the sacrosanct authority of the journalist in the same way as Luther asserted that individuals could have a direct relationship with God without the intermediary of the priest. The Internet has disintermediated middlemen in other industries, why should journalism be immune?
The tools of broadcast media have gone from owning paper mills, presses, million-dollar transmitters and broadcast licenses, to having a cheap PC or a mobile phone in one’s pocket. That gives everyone the ability to have a direct rapport with the news as either a consumer or a producer, instantaneously. This is like the advent of literacy: it threatened elites and sometimes created problems. But it empowered individuals and led to a far better world. The new literacy from digital media will do the same, even as it creates new problems. Ultimately, I believe it is a positive thing for journalism, because it enables something journalism has lacked: competition from the very public we serve.
In countries such as Iran, Burma and Egypt, bloggers have played an important role as citizen journalists reporting on subjects that the state-controlled media wouldn’t allow professional journalists to cover. In Iran, bloggers have for years been rated as the most trustworthy source of news because they have been difficult to control by the Islamic government.
In Burma, when monks took to the streets to protest against the military junta in September 2007, it was up to citizen journalists on the scene to blog, snap photos and videos and distribute them online so the world could see what was happening when the government killed and rounded up protesters.
An anonymous blogger in Bangkok who went by the online name Jotman went into Burma to talk to monks who were in hiding in safe houses. Jotman interviewed them and then posted the videos and their stories on his blog, sharing information that many traditional journalists couldn’t get because the Burmese government is hostile to foreign journalists. Later, Jotman won an award from the press freedom group, Reporters Without Borders, for his work as a solo citizen journalist covering the Burmese uprising and crackdown.
In Egypt, blogger/activists have helped to organize protests against the government, and have often provided the only coverage of those protests and resulting arrests. When one prominent blogger, Alaa Abd El-Fatah, was arrested in May 2006, the Egyptian blogosphere spread the word to tell outside media about what happened, leading to foreign pressure on the Egyptian government to release him. During his time in jail, Alaa passed out messages to visitors, who then posted the messages on his blog, effectively allowing him to blog from jail and tell his supporters how he was doing.
Hyper-local news is the information relevant to small communities or neighborhoods that has been overlooked by traditional news outlets. Thanks to cheap self-publishing and communication online, independent hyper-local news sites have sprung up to serve these communities, while traditional media have tried their own initiatives to cover what they’ve missed. In some cases, hyper-local sites let anyone submit stories, photos or videos of the community, with varying degrees of moderation and filtering. Pioneers such as Northwest Voice in Bakersfield, California, and YourHub, which started in Denver, actually reverse publish select material from their websites in print publications. Both of them are run by mainstream newspaper publishers.
The motivation for starting independent hyper-local sites is often to tell the previously untold stories of communities, while also bringing like-minded people together online. Mainstream news outlets that have created hyper-local sites are trying to engage their readers, while also creating a place for smaller, niche advertisers who want to reach a highly geographically targeted audience.
The business models for hyper-local news sites are still evolving, and some independent sites are run as labors of love by their publishers and communities. Venture-funded startups Backfence and Bayosphere tried and failed to make a business out of creating a series of hyper-local sites, while Pegasus News was bought by Fisher Communications.
In the past few years, people have used a variety of methods to capture hyper-local news, from assigning professional journalists to hyper-local beats to collecting stories from interested citizens, to a combination of the two. In terms of presentation, the storytelling format has included everything from articles and videos to blogs, wikis, and annotated maps. The following is a list of some of the ways that traditional and independent media have gathered hyper-local news.
Perhaps the least work-intensive approach to a hyper-local news site is simply allowing people to post their stories with minimal moderation. The moderation could depend on users flagging submissions as inappropriate, or on a publisher who might check the site for obscenities or spam. A common challenge with these sites is getting people to contribute content on a regular basis, and then filtering or highlighting the best material.
Strengths: Open format invites more participants.
Weaknesses: Takes hard work to get people to contribute; varying quality of submissions.
Examples: Philly Future, BeniciaNews.com, IndyMoms, iBrattleboro, NowPublic
Many sites ask people to tell the stories of their community, with a mixture of text, photos and videos. But if the site is associated with a traditional news outlet – most likely a local newspaper – there are usually more stringent rules for moderation. Eventually the best of the online content is reverse published into a regular print publication that goes out to people who live in that community. Professional editors might eliminate submissions that contain libelous or offensive content, and could spend time filtering and highlighting important issues.
Strengths: Higher quality content and filtering of stories; increased distribution in print with more ad revenues.
Weaknesses: Contributors don’t get equal exposure across platforms, and the excerpted content may exclude some points of view.
Examples: Northwest Voice, YourHub, Bluffton Today
Rather than opening up the editorial to citizens, many place-specific blogs are written by people who review local happenings with a unique voice. These blogs might include polls or comments so others can contribute, but the main focus is on the voice of the bloggers. Some of these blogs cover small suburban areas, while others are focused on urban life.
These sites include very few original stories, and simply aggregate and link to stories found on other news outlets or blogs for that locality. Some do include ways for people in the community to share their views on stories with comments or forums. Topix, for example, has had success reaching small rural areas by being the only online outlet for news in those communities.
Strengths: Low overhead and largely automated operations.
Weaknesses: Not enough local flavor or voice, except through outside links.
Examples: Topix, Placeblogger, Outside.in
A few traditional news organizations are experimenting with having their reporters go out as “one-man bands” who write up quick reports, take photographs or video and file them from the road. Gannett has tried to do more coverage of community events, while Reuters is working with Nokia to outfit reporters with gear to get raw footage of live events as they happen.
Strengths: Quick coverage of more events on the fly.
Weaknesses: Lower quality video and photos; not enough time for thoughtful work.
Examples: Reuters Mobile Journalism, Gannett’s MoJos
Perhaps the most overlooked way that communities can stay in touch and share news is through email lists and online forums. Many of these are ad hoc lists created by citizens, with the content coming directly from them. These email lists let you get a daily digest of all the content in one email and allow you to respond or post your own items. The subject matter can be intensely local to your neighborhood,
Strengths: Very local information helps neighbors get to know each other.
Weaknesses: Usually not a lot of moderation so content quality can be low.
Examples: Front Porch Forums, DCWatch
While no one disputes that the Internet and new technology can help small geographical communities share news, the open question is whether these connections will lead to profitability for news organizations or startups. And what’s also unclear is whether independent startups have an advantage or disadvantage to existing traditional local news outlets. Northwest Voice and YourHub have been financially successful for their parent news organizations, but most of their revenue comes from reverse published print editions. Hyper-local startups with venture capital funding such as Backfence and Bayosphere have failed because they couldn’t get enough locals online – nor the advertising to support their businesses.
Two newer hyper-local startups, YourStreet and EveryBlock, are aiming to use more aggregation and annotated maps to show what’s happening in a locale, without having high-cost editorial from reporters. But there remains a tough balancing act between using amateur or automated information and on-the-ground reporting by professional journalists. Journalist Steve Outing, who helped start The Enthusiast Group as a series of niche sites about sports, wrote about his lessons learned when his business failed and how that could apply to hyper-local sites:
We believed that having a core level of professional content – from our site editors – would be enough to attract a loyal following even if the usersubmitted content wasn’t enough on its own. But I think we didn’t have nearly enough of that. If I had any money left to throw at the business, I’d hire more well-known athletes and adventurers, so that the core was a larger pool of professional content – and I’d mix that in with the best user content.
I’m not saying that user-submitted content isn’t worthwhile, let me be clear about that. I am saying that I think you can’t rely too much on it. And you need to filter out and highlight the best user content, while downplaying the visibility of the mediocre stuff.
While the online business model is being sorted out, newspaper publishers have been making money by selling print ads into special editions that are stocked with the best of the online content. Travis Henry, the editor of YourHub at the Rocky Mountain News, wrote about that paper’s experience running various hyper-local news sites since 2005:
YourHub has registered over 34,000 members in the Denver metro area alone. We have 18 print sections just in Colorado. YourHub is now live in eight states and poised to launch in more, admittedly with varied results. In Colorado alone we have more than 3,000 stories posted a month and more than 3,000 events a month. Our biggest achievement has been the creation of an awesome online community that has become a large family of sorts. User gatherings we have held have been powerful and prove that this is an experiment worth going forward.
We have been in the black since our first year. Most of our revenue comes from print advertising.
J-Lab, an incubator of news experiments at the University of Maryland, conducted a survey of 191 hyper-local sites in early 2007 and found that most sites are simply labors of love, funded by founders who are not out to make a fortune. Of those surveyed, 51% said they don’t need money to keep the operation going, and 42% said revenues didn’t cover their expenses. But they were largely happy with the local impact their sites had made, with 73% saying their sites were successful.
Whether hyper-local sites are run as an adjunct to a traditional media outlet, run as a labor of love or non-profit, what’s most important for the public’s interest is that the community feels connected to a news source or website that engages them and lets them discuss intensely local issues. The same could be said for citizen journalism, a pursuit that has been done mainly by passionate people who aren’t professional journalists, but who feel they can contribute to the media conversation. Both hyperlocal websites and citizen journalism are key to bringing in more voices to traditional journalism, and broadening a world view that was once the exclusive domain of the professional media.
This chapter uses material previously published on PBS MediaShift in the following entries:
• Your Guide to Citizen Journalism http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/09/digging_deeperyour_guide_to_ci.html
• Your Guide to Hyper-Local News http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/12/digging_deeperyour_guide_to_hy.html
Anderson, Chris (31 July 2006) “‘Actually Existing’” Citizen Journalism Projects and Typologies: Part I on the Unpacking My Library blog http://indypendent.typepad.com/academese/2006/07/actually_existi.html
Citizen Media Cookbook by Hartsville Today http://www.jour.sc.edu/pages/fisher/hvtd/HVTDyear1.pdf (PDF File)
CyberJournalist.net’s List of Citizen Media Initiatives http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/002226.php
Fowler, Geoffrey A. (28 September 2007) “‘Citizen Journalists’ Evade Blackout On Myanmar News” in the Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119090803430841433.html
Gillmor, Dan (2004) We the Media, O’Reilly We Media Report for The Media Center at the American Press Institute http://www.mediacenter.org/pages/mc/research/we_media_report/
Glaser, Mark (4 April 2007) “Sunlight Foundation Mixes Tech, Citizen Journalism to Open Congress” on PBS MediaShift http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/04/digging_deepersunlight_foundat.html
Glaser, Mark (8 October 2007) “Can Internet, Blogs Sustain the Saffron Revolution?” on PBS MediaShift http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/10/burma_unrestcan_internet_blogs.html
Glaser, Mark (17 November 2004) “The New Voices: Hyperlocal Citizen Media Sites Want You (to Write)!” at Online Journalism Review http://ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1098833871.php
Katrina Timeline at ePluribus Media http://timelines.epluribusmedia.net/timelines/index.php?&mjre=KATR&table_name=tl_katr&function=search&order=date&order_type=DESC
Outing, Steve (15 June 2005) “The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism by Steve Outing” at Poynter Online http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=83126
Potts, Mark (16 July 2007) “Co-Founder Potts Shares Lessons Learned from Backfence Bust” on PBS MediaShift http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/07/postmortemcofounder_potts_shar.html
SourceWatch’s Tools for Citizen Journalists http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tools_for_citizen_journalism