Pew study contrasts citizen sites v. blogs v. sites tied to legacy media

Pew's State of the News Media 2009 survey examines, among other things, "363 journalism sites in 46 markets (145 citizen journalism sites and 218 tied to commercial media)."

Led by professors Margaret Duffy, Esther Thorson, Stephen Lacy and Daniel Riffe the study compares citizen news blogs, citizen news sites, and sites tied to legacy media.

It finds

[C]lear differences between citizen blogs that primarily offer commentary (along with links to already reported information) and a new array of citizen news sites that also do original reporting. The broader citizen news sites were more interactive, more transparent and more likely to use citizen content. Blogs, while easy to create and set up, were much more limited and less open. Even legacy media now surpass blogs in many of the characteristics that citizen media were once supposed to represent.

Among the findings:

• Blogs were the least the likely to allow citizens to contribute — even to post comments or e-mail the site. The leaders in such interactivity were citizen news sites.

• Legacy media excelled in creating innovative ways for people to download or receive content.

• Legacy sites were also the most transparent about their policies and expectations for users.

• One area where legacy media trailed both citizen blogs and news sites was in providing links within their news stories to outside material. Legacy sites were more than twice as likely as citizen sites to offer no links to outside material.

• On the other hand, the citizen sites linked to legacy news sites twice as often as legacy sites linked to citizen sites, with the citizen sites using the legacy sites as their “news” source.

The nature of the content on the three types of sites varied fairly sharply. Legacy sites provided the greatest percent of news (89%), close to double that of citizen news sites (56%), and three times that of blog content (27%).

More here.

Wordcloud courtesy of Alfred Hermida

Also see: "I'll believe in the triumph of citizen journalism when I see it"

Citizen journalism workshop in Bangalore on May 9

On Saturday May 9 Citizen Matters, the Web magazine published with open source software in Bangalore, India, will host a three-hour workshop "to help citizen journalists understand what it takes to do credible reporting."

[The workshop] is for the part-time blogger who wants to sharpen his skills or for any civic-minded person with a hankering to contribute to a website or media outlet. By the end of the session, the participant will have a better sense of what it takes to produce good journalism.

Kanchan Kaur, vice dean of the Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media, and Ralph Frammolino, award-winning reporter formerly of the Los Angeles Times, will conduct the workshop.

Details here.

Also see: Some thoughts on citizen journalism and Mumbai
And: Criminal charge against Orkut activist frays freedom of expression in India

"Newspapers will not be replaced by any single model"

Will newspapers be run out of existence by online news sites?

Sarah de Crescenzo, student reporter at the University of California San Diego's Guardian, writes if they are, "[W]e need to make sure we don’t discard journalism along with them."

In choosing a new business model, you should ask yourself why journalism exists in the first place.

Read her why here.

Also see: Citizen journalism will complement "public media 2.0," says white paper
And: Pulitzers, a humbling experience for Internet journalists
And: Dan Gillmor: Be skeptical of everything, but not equally
Finally: A sustainable model emerges: Use collective intelligence but fact-check with journalists

Can citizen journalism unshackle us from structure, restore a sense of autonomy?

I am reading Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain's book titled The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it (Yale University Press, 2008; download free via Creative Commons).

Strange. It is making me think of citizen journalism.

Mr. Zittrain narrates on pages 127-28:

The Dutch city of Drachten has undertaken an unusual experiment in traffic management. The roads serving forty-five thousand people are "verkeersbordvrij": free of nearly all road signs. Drachten is one of several European test sites for a traffic planning approach called "unsafe is safe." The city has removed its traffic signs, parking meters, and even parking spaces. The only rules are that drivers should yeild to those on their right at an intersection, and that parked cars blocking others will be towed.

The result so far is counterintuitive: a dramatic improvement in vehicular safety. Without signs to obey mechanically (or, as studies have shown, disobey seventy percent of the time), people are forced to drive more mindfully -- operating their cars with more care and attention to the surrounding circumstances. They communicate more with pedestrians, bicyclists, and other drivers using hand signals and eye contact. They see other drivers rather than other cars . . . "The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles."

It's a fine argument.

I am no anarchist but I can see that the nature of rules is to preclude the individual's thoughtfulness of others. The presumption of disorder questions the individual's inherent chivalry; consequently, it can drain social capital.

Similarly, the alphabet restricts our thinking to our command of it, the structure of news reporting impedes our free appreciation of an event, and so on.

My point is that in this context, citizen journalism offers a whiff of fresh air.

Perhaps the unrestricted, market-oriented offerings of citizen journalists will free the individual of the straitjacket of standardization in journalistic practice.

Perhaps the unrestricted, market-oriented offerings of citizen journalists will help the individual recover a measure of libertarian autonomy.

Perhaps.

So is citizen journalism some sort of panacea? Hardly. To quote Mr. Zittrain again (p. 216):

The constraints . . . [will] now come not only from the well-organized governments or firms of Privacy 1.0, but from a few people generatively drawing upon the labors of many to greatly impact rights otherwise guaranteed by a legal system.

Also see: Citizen journalism will complement "public media 2.0," says white paper
And: Pulitzers, a humbling experience for Internet journalists
And: Dan Gillmor: Be skeptical of everything, but not equally
Finally: A sustainable model emerges: Use collective intelligence but fact-check with journalists

Dan Gillmor: Be skeptical of everything, but not equally skeptical of everything

Oracles don't have to be mystics, or sport white beards, or live in Greece. They can be clean shaven, courtly and live in Arizona.

To the oldest of the inane questions, "Is blogging journalism?," Dan Gillmor, the veritable oracle of citizen journalism, responds:

"Oh, God, I can't wait for the day when that question disappears from the world, because it's just such the wrong question," he says. "Some blogging is journalism, most is not. Let's move on to something more interesting." . . .

"The question we should be asking is, what is journalism?"

In Gillmor's view, journalism is defined by certain principles. Among them: skepticism, accuracy, fairness, thoroughness, transparency, independence and keeping an open mind. He believes we should replace the old, impossible notion of "objectivity" with informed, critical judgment. And journalists should treat the process as a conversation, not a lecture. That means listening to more than the official sources.

How to enhance the quality of journalism? Mr. Gillmor places the onus on news consumers.

We've got the supply side pretty well covered. There are all kinds of media being created. Certainly there are lots of problems, but lots of opportunities, and it's pretty exciting what's going on.

One of the places we're really lagging is the demand side. All the supply in the world won't matter if people don't demand something better than they're getting. People who've been consumers of media have to become activists in their consumption. They can't just be passive consumers, because the result is the generally crappy state of journalism that we have today in all respects. . . .

I haven't stopped caring about helping people do good journalism, whether it's traditional or citizen or whatever you want to call it. But if we don't turn the consumers of media into active or activist-type consumers, which means in part taking actual responsibility for what we read as opposed to just letting it show up and not being satisfied, people will be missing something that citizenship should include, which is to be active in how you get your information.

Mr. Gillmor pulls no punches.

Check out the good interview with Fiona Morgan of the Independent, published from North Carolina's Triangle.

Image courtesy of Jeff Risley

Also see: Citizen journalism will complement "public media 2.0," says white paper
And: Pulitzers, a humbling experience for Internet journalists
And: Citizen journalism welcome but must be edited, says Scripps publisher
Finally: A sustainable model emerges: Use collective intelligence but fact-check with journalists

Hyperlocal site seeks to explore south LA's "wealth of characters, stories and lessons"

Bill Celis of the University of Southern California introduces Intersections, a J-Lab-funded community Web site which would highlight "untold stories" from blue collar neighborhoods in south Los Angeles.

In Mr. Celis' words the site would, rather ambitiously, let "South LA residents . . . consume all the news about their communities – good and bad – on a computer, on radio, or via cell phone."

[R]esidents themselves will have a great voice in determining our news coverage through their contributions and feedback. . . .

Our citizen journalists include teachers, students, South LA residents, all writing about the rhythm of urban life in its various incarnations. They also include high school bloggers who also produce slide shows as part of Intersection's high school mentoring program spearheaded by USC Annenberg second-year graduate journalism student Emily Henry. One 12th grade student group at Crenshaw High School, just south of the USC's main campus, explored the impact of the plummeting economy by interviewing day laborers. Others reported on teenage pregnancy by visiting with Crenshaw's teen mothers. Racial profiling was scrutinized by yet another Crenshaw group, with students interviewing security guards and people who believe they had been racially profiled by the police.

More introduction here.

Also see: SPJ partners with Helium to champion citizen journalism
Also see: Mainstream media sites increasingly welcome citizen participation
And: Veteran editor champions hyperlocal Web journalism
And: Community blogs, "a new breed of watchdog"
And: Citizen journalism will complement "public media 2.0," says white paper
Finally: A sustainable model emerges: Use collective intelligence but fact-check with journalists

Citizen journalism welcome but must be edited, says Scripps publisher

Competitor Daily News reports that Memphis' E.W. Scripps-owned 168-year-old newspaper, the Commercial Appeal, has made "recent moves that severely cut the reporting staff, eliminated classified ads from the already thin Monday and Tuesday print editions and an admission that the [Appeal] probably won’t be covering less urgent topics in the future."

Appeal editor Chris Peck responds, “If we run out of people . . . , then we’re going to turn to freelancers and more community-generated content.”

Yet publisher Joseph Pepe, who insists the Appeal is profitable, seems to have rather strong views of that sort of content.

“All blogging is citizen journalism,” he told The Memphis News. “In a lot of cases it’s unsubstantiated. It’s not objective. It’s not edited content. It leans more toward opinion and subjectivity. Anytime we have citizen journalism, it’s still going to get edited. It’s still going to get verified. It’s going to get checked for facts before we post it. We apply the same rules to citizen-sponsored journalism as we do to our top line reporter.”

So does Otis L. Sanford, the Appeal's deputy managing editor.

Sanford said citizen journalism “has its place” and has been discussed since the early 1990s. It shows up in the pages he governs in the form of opinion pieces and letters to the editor. Non-newspaper employees also serve on the [Appeal's] editorial board.

“Now, I am a traditional, old-fashioned journalist,” Sanford said. “And I believe that while citizen journalism has its place, I’m not one – and maybe this is an old-fashioned view – but I’m not one to think that citizen journalism can ever take the place of the traditional journalism that I know and love. I just don’t believe that.”

Full story here.

Also read: A sustainable model emerges: Use collective intelligence but fact-check with journalists
And: Can selling news via the Web save newspapers?
And: Mainstream media sites increasingly welcome citizen participation