This article is part of a series of articles by Media Mouse covering the 2007 National Conference for Media Reform. We believe that these will be of value to those organizing for social change in the Grand Rapids and West Michigan area.
This session brought together four individuals involved in citizen journalism, Jay Rosen of PressThink, Christopher Rabb of Afro-Netizen, Chris Nolan of Spot-on.com, and Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media to discuss the impacts and implications of citizen journalism. The panel was moderated by Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation, an organization formed last year to use technology to increase access to information about Congress. The Foundation originally intended for its audience to be corporate media journalists, but given the failure of the corporate media to understand the importance of the Internet, its initial task has shifted to giving the information to citizens so that they can become journalists and researchers.
The first panelist to speak was Jay Rosen of PressThink, who explained that the media world has been completely turned on its head in the past few years with what was historically a one-way system of communication with one producer and many consumers becoming one in which there are now many producers creating content in an environment where there is more interaction between producers and their audience. The audience had historically been passive due to the high costs associated with production, but starting in the 1970s and 1980s with the public access movement, tools to create media became cheaper and more citizens had access to create media, although with public access citizens lacked the resources to effectively challenge what was being produced by corporations. With the Internet, and specifically blogs, the cost of and access to media production tools was further reduced and people have formed what Rosen described as a "producer revolution." Rosen wants to take the citizen journalism phenomenon beyond blogs, introducing what he calls "ProAm" journalism, or professionals working with amateur journalists, to collaboratively write and edit stories using the internet. He has launched a venture called Newassignment.net that aims to organize people for open source reporting using his "ProAm" model.
Panelist Christopher Rabb of Afro-Netizen explained how his blog evolved from a mailing list in 2003. His big break was in 2004 when he covered the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Boston and was one of the only African-Americans blogging at the time. He explained that his blog has served an important role in that it has created a venue where the views of people of color are shared in an online world that tends to be as segregated as the offline world. This has benefited both people of color, who read his blog as a source for independent news, and white people who use his blog to eavesdrop on conversations taking place between people of color that they would not otherwise have access to off the Internet. He writes with the realization that technology can be a tool that either helps or oppresses blacks depending on how it is used. Rabb acknowledged that he works within a small subset of the cultural elite, but explains that he has used his social capital and privilege to reach others. He asserted that he has difficulties with many other bloggers that are white, Ivy League educated, male, and privileged because they fail to acknowledge their privilege and never consider how it affects what they do. Speaking on the topic of the corporate media using content created by citizen journalists, Rabb expressed skepticism that they could convey the context necessary to understand issues such as police brutality--which most white Americans do not understand--and said that the corporate media cannot be trusted to provide the appropriate filters and context.
Chris Nolan with Spot-On.com explained that her organization is working with independent media producers on the web to sell their stories to the corporate media. While she asserted that the Internet provides an opportunity for many voices to be heard that otherwise would not be heard, she believes that the corporate media's reach is important and that the independent media movement benefits from having its stories heard by a wider audience. She has benefited, as have other bloggers, from the fact that the corporate media understands competition and has seen that blogs can be a source of competition. She also told the audience to consider that efforts by the corporate media to hire bloggers might be sincere. Computers have drastically changed the function of newsrooms with each computer being able to function as a newsroom, but she explained that there is still a role for editors as it is not enough to just put out raw and unformed data. Nolan also reminded the audience that the basics--who, what, and where--need to be adhered to and not forgotten by citizen journalists.
Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media closed out the panel by explaining what he termed the "liberation" of the journalism industry at the hands of citizen journalism and participating audiences. He explained that citizen journalism has a core audience of journalists who are wanting to learn more and engage their traditional audience, newsmakers who want more people writing about them and who are being pushed to become more transparent, and other citizens who are receiving multiple sources of information and whom are able to interact with producers. He described how the corporate media views new media as a source of competition, especially in the realm of ad revenue, where sites such as eBay and Craig's List have taken ad revenue that had previously been used to support journalism. Gillmor explained that citizen journalists need to remember the principles of journalism, including thoroughness, accuracy, transparency, and independence, and stress the importance of putting those principles at the center of our work. He cautioned the audience that advocacy journalism needs to make its agenda clear, otherwise it risked losing its relevancy. He also stressed that net neutrality is essential for citizen journalism and told the audience that AT&T's recent voluntary agreement to recognize net neutrality for at least two years was not a victory as had been said in other panels and that the citizen journalists had to continue to fight for net neutrality.
