Shifting gears to discuss notions of citizen and civic journalism: what do you see are the principle differences between those?
I see really huge differences between them and I really don’t like the aligning of the distinctions. I think that it was done almost out of convenience when civic journalism started to decline around 2003 and not coincidentally with the sunsetting of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism. There were some people who basically thought, for reasons of good will, that citizen journalism was going to be a continuation of what civic journalism was and in fact even an expansion. If civic journalism’s goal was to involve citizens in the newsgathering process, then certainly the Web was going to open that up even further and to make that process even easier.
For some of the reasons that we’ve just talked about, certainly the Web and Web 2.0 in particular have opened up journalism to more voices. There have been some places like the Spokane Spokesman-Review up until about a year ago under Steve Smith and Ken Sands, where they actually were making a mixed model of citizen and civic journalism work extremely well. But again, that required not just citizens but editors and reporters. There are three legs to that stool and what we’ve seen, I think, since then is fewer editors, fewer reporters, more citizen voices less well-edited and less well-organized. I know that there are supporters of citizen journalism who would say “well, that’s fine.” Essentially the Web is self-organizing, that we don’t really need editors and reporters to organize that discussion, that the discussion people spontaneously engage in tends to organize itself.
Again, I don’t want to contest that there is a great benefit there; I think that’s an important moment to understand. We need to be able to hold two sides of a contradiction in our minds at once. It is positive that citizens are able to in fact both write and report but also contest and question and dispute the accounts of the traditional press. I think that’s a good thing. But I also think that in the absence of the journalistic function, which does involve editing and reporting at a moderate to high level of professionalism, that we are actually missing an important element that adds significant value to citizen journalism as well.
Lew makes a good point about the distinction between civic/public journalism and citizen journalism. A more detailed elucidation of those differences would be useful. Writing in 2006, Cole Campbell suggested:
ReplyDelete"We should take care to discern which kinds of citizen journalism build civic capacity and create publics or public relationships and which kinds serve other functions."
Building civic capacity implies an important role for editors and reporters to organize the discussion, as Lew notes. I can imagine an environment where a journalist’s primary role is facilitator of public conversation, editing, verifying and organizing the ongoing reporting going on in a community. Building civic capacity, creating publics from disparate groups, serving as a connecting tissue between those doing public work could all be useful journalistic functions in the future.