does the web make every citizen a journalist?
Posted on | October 8, 2009 | No Comments
In a world where everyone can self-publish and write stories about their everyday lives and the world around them, is everyone a journalist?
PBS’s Video Your Vote project recruited citizens to take video cameras to their polling places and upload the video of their voting experience to YouTube. PBS asked citizens to report on any problems with voting machines, access to polling places, voter intimidation, and registration, as well as interesting perspectives on the election and the voting process. What does this mean for the future of journalism in the age of digital media?
Obviously, there are a lot of questions on this subject and very few answers as we enter a period of relative anarchy in terms of journalism and media models. In one of our readings this week, Newspapers and Thinking The Unthinkable, Clay Shirky talks about the history of newspapers and printed media, and how the current model was not intentional and deliberate, but rather an experiment that turned out to be fortuitously effective for nigh on 500 years. I went to the Newseum recently, and my favorite exhibit was the one consisting of hundreds of years of newspapers and their predecessors along a long (long) hallway. It’s pretty cool to see the common narrative of society laid out like that, and it is a bit disappointing to think that there likely won’t be a similar sort of central channel of communication for the next 500 years.
On the other hand, the opportunities available to us now, at the cusp of this new media age, are exciting and innumerable. When every citizen is a journalist at some points in her or his life, the coverage of important news events will be more dynamic, compelling, textured, and told from a wider range of perspectives than when woven into one cohesive narrative by one writer or editor. All of the people on Video Your Vote got to tell pieces of their stories, and thereby gave us a story of their community. This part of the promise of the new media age is immensely appealing to me.
When news is curated by the establishment, so to speak, the danger is that it’s easy to represent a paucity of views, a small subset of the millions of perspectives that exist in the population as a whole. With the decentralization of the news, we can find out how all sorts of groups make sense of the world, unmediated by that establishment voice, which may have particular ways of interpreting their contributions that don’t reflect the group’s perspective in an authentic way.
This idea runs somewhat counter to the idea that the new journalism will require careful cultivation by a cadre of passionate news professionals. I get that editing, culling, and training is necessary to routinely generate high-quality journalism from amateurs, but I also think that an important aspect of the web is that there is no formal barrier to entry as in printed newspapers. Anyone can comment on On Faith on washingtonpost.com, even though very few letters to the editor will be printed in the non-digital paper in any given week. And the moments of web greatness are when comments or blog posts or YouTube videos go viral because they represent something important in the cultural zeitgeist, even if that contribution wasn’t recognized by a traditional professional editor or journalist.
I make no predictions about the specific future of journalism online, because many people (one of whom is my professor, Nicco Mele- whose website is definitely not dangerous, so ignore the year-old warning you may see) have written and spoken more and more intelligently on the subject than I, but I am intrigued and will watch with interest as it unfolds.
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