Citizen Journalism Curation through Google Alerts

Google alerts seemed to me like the perfect curation tool to learn about citizen journalism, since new material is always being created. My concern was that I would be drowning in the number of results every day unless I had a long string of search terms and Boolean operators. Luckily, things have been working out so far, and I think I'm going to add more alerts. Here's how I started out:

Pretty simple. I wanted the best results for citizen journalism once a day so I could keep up but not be overwhelmed. So far, this has meant that I've received an alert every day with one new article to read. That has been pretty manageable, and from what I've been reading, I think I want to add "participatory journalism" to my searches as well.

Selected Results

This article from an African newspaper deals with the rise of citizen journalism and, quite unusually for the genre, provides quotes from a lot of scholarly references. Niyomukiza says that while citizen journalism has its perks (immediacy, new opportunities for minorities, citizens can go places the mainstream media can't), it lacks some of the things that make the mainstream media worthwhile (professionalism, meetings ethical standards, reliability, knowing sources). The parts about ethical standards were particularly interesting to me. Citizen journalists, he says, "don't care about privacy, sensitivity, balance, etc" and don't live up to the standards that would be expected of professional journalists. He suggests that citizen journalists learn basic professional journalistic standards.

One article from an emergency management journal considers how citizen journalism has contributed to the dissemination of information during crises. What is interesting about this article is the way it depicts professionals and citizens working together, instead of being in conflict with each other. A citizen might publish a survivor's diary, eyewitness statements, pictures, or video, and then a professional journalist would come across it and link these first-person accounts together to create a larger story. The authors also note that decision-makers in crises should integrate information from their citizens into their decisions in the future.