Citizens, journalists join forces to cover the news
A look at partnerships as PEJ examines the State of the News Media
March 11, 2010
Michele McLellan
The Project for Excellence in Journalism asked me for my thoughts on its research assessing citizen journalism efforts in its annual State of the News Media report. (Links: Main report and chapter on citizen journalism. The research examines citizen online news and opinion sites and blogs and compares them to professional journalism. I told PEJ journalists and citizens in many communities work together to cover the news. Here's my take on that development:
This is a time of dynamic change in community news and information. And one of the most important shifts we are seeing right now is the merging of professional and non-professional newsgathering efforts.
The research produced for the Project for Excellence in Journalism's State of the News Media report provides valuable insights into the motivations of people who start community news sites and blogs. It shows that across a highly uneven and chaotic blogosphere, people value news and information in service to democracy.
But the new news ecology is dizzying. As it develops in ways and with a speed we can’t predict, the requirements of academic research may leave out the context of a rapidly changing environment. As a result, this new research could be read to reinforce the out-of-date idea that citizen news and professional news are in competition.
If professionals and nonprofessionals were ever producing news and information as distinctly separate groups, this is becoming less so every day. They’re merging. They’re joining forces in exciting experiments that will help shape the future of news, information and civic engagement.
So I think it is helpful to look at what the research tells us about the strengths of legacy media and of citizen news sites and how they might help one another provide news and information to neighborhoods, communities, cities and beyond. How can we work together to create c more informed, engaged communities?
It’s happening already. The Seattle Times, among other legacy outlets, is partnering with some of these micro locals to share links and collaborate on reporting. Still other legacy news organizations are looking to become aggregators of community sites because it’s a way to deliver more micro local news to their users (and increase their value to users in the process).
Crowdsourcing efforts range from the simple – like this Washington Post effort to cover the early February “snowpocalypse” – to the highly complex – ProPublica’s effort to enlist citizens to track stimulus projects in their areas.
We're also seeing start ups that attempt to mix community building with professional standards of reporting. Oakland Local is one example such experiment. In its first four months of existence it has built an impressive following and offered content that would not otherwise be available to East Bay residents.
Jay Rosen recently pointed me to John Paton’s statement to Journal Register employees as Paton took over as CEO of a legacy news company emerging from bankruptcy.
Paton called on Journal Register employees to create “an open and questing company, allowing us to experiment in ways to truly participate with the audience. By opening ourselves up to ideas and partnerships within our communities and those companies that are harnessing technology to both create and distribute information, we can participate with the audience in ways we have never done before. And we can become better providers of local journalism.”
If partnership is an emerging tenet of journalism, sustainability is the Holy Grail.
We seeing some success at community or micro local levels -- whether volunteer or entrepreneurial or a mix -- in producing valuable news and information at a relatively low cost because it doesn’t all require paid professional content producers. Some organizations are establishing modest revenue streams from advertising and other sources, such as organizing tech and advertising support for other local sites. These are not there yet in great numbers, but it’s starting to look like it might work.
It is interesting too that corporations are showing interest in micro local -- AOL's Patch, for example, sees potential profits here. Seattle - a tech savvy metropolis with distinct neighborhoods -- is one hot bed for neighborhood blogs and some neighborhoods have competing news blogs.
While micro local organizations show signs of sustainability, online news organizations that are attempting to play a watchdog role or to connect with larger populations at local and state levels have the challenge of higher costs to pay professionals -- costs that online advertising and donations may not cover. It’s not coincidence that established newspaper organizations are abandoning much of this reporting as too expensive.
We all need to be concerned with a revenue model to support journalism in the public interest -- whether it is labor intensive investigative work or the richly reported narratives that bind our communities across differences.
Revenue for these organizations, whether for-profit or nonprofit -- is a key challenge. MinnPost has been at it for a few years and reports significant progress toward sustainability. But little is assured.
It's also important to note that professional journalists and citizen news producers are not the only players in the news and information field. The opinion bloggers who figure heavily in this research will play a diminished role as others enter the field.
Universities are putting student reporting feet on the street, often in concert with citizens or nonprofits. The nascent Government 2.0 movement uses digital tools to put data in front of citizens and engage them in reporting problems and concerns. Non governmental organizations and other nonprofits are jumping into the fray, telling their stories directly to the public and engaging citizens in their work.
These two-way exchanges may bypass legacy journalism – as Rosen has asked, who needs reporters to dig up White House visitor logs if they are routinely posted online?
But these practices also make information more widely available and free up professional journalists to assume more critical roles such as reporting hidden information, analyzing it, and curating and contextualizing information others provide.
In other pro-am merger news, nonprofits and other citizen-led operations are employing journalists displaced from the legacy news industry to manage their projects and produce content. It will be interesting to see how these partnerships affect the partners: Will the journalists become more authentic and community-oriented? Will they renegotiate a blanket standard of “objectivity” that distances them from a passion for community and the goal of making sure civic discussion goes well? Will the organizations adopt values such as transparency and verification?
Those of us who come from a newspaper background tend to see a mass news outlet as the most effective platform for journalism because that is what we know and what we love. There is and was a lot to love about it. But that sometimes blinds us to its considerable shortcomings.
Today's reality is very chaotic, and it is easy to point to deficiencies. But the new landscape is also more diverse and information rich than ever before. Digital tools make it easier and easier to stitch together the information niches - making equal broadband access critical. Another key question is how we make sense of it all -- news literacy has never been more important.
As we survey a news ecosystem in that may be moving from childhood into a difficult adolescence, it's important to remember that there have been a lot of mediocre newspapers for a very long time. We benefitted from highlighting the good ones, the leaders in the field.
Now there are a lot of mediocre newspapers and a lot of mediocre online news outlets, and those sites are very easy to point to and lament. But it's no less important to focus on the promising ones and what we can learn from them.
My own work focuses on identifying promising local online news sites, defining significant types or categories of them, and helping them share what they are learning. Here's my list so far. I welcome suggestions for additional sites.
I was heartened that the survey for PEJ found that many online news operators are in it because they believe news and information is important to our democracy.
“For the most part,” the researchers said, “these site owners highly valued democratic principles of giving citizens a voice, providing fair and accurate information about the communities, helping communities in deciding their own future, and encouraging people learning how to use the Internet to further their community participation.”
What a great mantra for journalism. One more sign that the Web may help journalism get back to its roots? Ben Franklin would be proud.