Budding Thoughts on Citizen Journalism (and more on Google alert curation)

A video review of Dan Gillmor's book is coming soon, but in the meantime I thought I'd give a quick update on my thoughts with citizen journalism as a broader topic. As I've continued to curate content using Google alerts, I've come across some useful articles and some not-so-useful articles, which I fully expected. Luckily, it's easy to filter out the bad ones quickly.

Funding and Audience Participation

Image by Howard Lake

Through two articles in particular (one article on a Chinese man changing up his journalism career and crowd-funding his entire income, and another article on a new news outlet in Philadelphia to be run by "an army of citizens" who are interested in having a say on how the city runs), I've had some new thoughts.

For one thing, economics play an interesting role in this new form of journalism. The two articles I've mentioned take it as a positive that only stories that the public finds interesting will be funded. In many ways this makes participatory journalism not only about more citizens participating in the creation of news, but also its funding.

My Own Contribution

I'd like to also take my participation in news up a notch from a simple consumer to a true contributor by using both my personal passions and skills and the information I've gleaned in my research. My thinking so far has led me to the idea of compiling and laying out a guide to good citizen journalism using the information I gather. As I've mentioned before, I love design and editing, and I'm sure this will be a good mix of new information and my own expertise. The book (or short guide) will, of course, be available for free online.

Where Next?

Aside from the obvious of gathering more information to compile into the guide I've talked about, I also need to figure out the best way to get my creation into circulation. Something I need to focus more on is social connections and proof in networks that would care about such a publication. While Google alerts has been a great tool for research, I need to find another tool that is more suited for social connection. More to come there. I also should decide what I want the final format of my guide to be (a simple PDF? Many file types that can be read on e-readers?). 

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.