Citizen Journalism Shifts Mainstream Media

A few major moves in mainstream media have the potential to significantly impact advocacy organizations. The trend toward “citizen journalism” is ramping up, meaning even wider exposure for people and organizations with strong viewpoints to find a mainstream audience.

The good news is that organizations like Planned Parenthood can use their vast supporter base to influence mainstream news directly. The bad news is that unscrupulous opponents who regularly distribute false and inflammatory “news” content will have a mainstream forum.

Today CNN launches ireport.com, which fuses online news with social media. Users post unedited news stories, and some of these stories become CNN stories. The guidelines prohibit content in a number of categories including “lewd” and “violent”, but do not require that content be factual. Mitch Gelman, CNN.com’s Senior Vice President explains that professional journalists are usually on the outside looking in. These new efforts combine that perspective with those on the inside looking out to create a full picture.

Within the next few months the New York Times will launch their own citizen journalism site titled “Times People”. The feature has a similar philosophy to ireport, though it will more closely resemble a social networking site.

Vivian Schiller, Sr Vice President of NYTimes.com, talked at a closed dinner last night about the trend at the Times toward citizen journalism. Her aim to is to transition from reader engagement being responsive to the news to reader engagement driving the news. For example, the Times ran a series titled “Kremlin rules” that was translated into Russian and put on a blog to solicit comments. More than 5,000 comments came in, and journalists then used those comments to create a follow up news story. Schiller also pointed to the news of Elizabeth Edwards breast cancer recurrence as another example of citizen journalism driving content at the Times. The flood of responses to that story resulted in another news feature about Ms. Edwards with a focus on public reaction.

Reuters Chief Scientist Nic Fulton described efforts to amplify citizen video journalism through a project called you witness. This effort solicits images captured by the public, though it remains traditional in that the images are filtered and selected by editors. In addition, Reuters has equipped 30 journalists with mobile phones that can be used to capture stories and videos in everyday circumstances, and immediately delivering that video to Reuters. The project is still in “beta phase” but it’s expected to be rolled out worldwide in the coming months.

When Schiller was pressed on the issue of trust in an environment where content is unfiltered, she said that “everyone may be a publisher, but that doesn’t make everyone a journalist. Without the skillful hand of an editor you can’t ensure credibility”. It’s unclear exactly how “Times People” will balance unfiltered news with credible news as it rolls out its social networking features. Gelman said, “The idea of trust is changing”. In the future he predicts that CNN will transition from being the final word to being transparent in labeling.