The concept is not new - that is the public participating in and contributing to the news process in various forms - but the movement has been accelerated by the speed and simplicity of new technology, as well as a new and broad interpretation of the term itself. So that means individuals joining a wider discussion of news and issues by contributing comments, photographs and video to mainstream sites and publishing content on independent, individual sites and blogs.
That said, it often feels that the movement is developing far more slowly than the discussion about it. I was rather hoping this week's NUJ/MediaGuardian roundtable discussion on citizen journalism might explore some new ideas or at least reach some fresh conclusions; instead it merely reiterated all those nagging questions that everyone would like answered.
"All traditional news organisations have to realise that the greatest thing we have to do is remain relevant to the new audience that has grown up in this landscape. "If we don't do that we will gradually start to feel we are operating on the hard shoulder of the motorway and will lose relevance and vitality." Simon Waldman, director of digital publishing at Guardian Unlimited |
MediaGuardian has documented other key points fairly comprehensively on the Organ Grinder blog. But of all these issues the most complex is that of payment.
To pick on just one point made that afternoon, Bill Hagerty of British Journalism Review said it is inevitable that the public will begin to demand payment for their work from the mainstream media once they recognised its commercial value.
That might eventually be true for people that contribute to mainstream sites, but would be dependent on much of the public learning the craft of negotiating a fair market rate and tackling the intricacies of copyright. Issues that even some professionals regularly struggle with in their dealings with some of the less-scrupulous news organisations.
Of course, there is still far more content being published and shared on a more altruistic basis outside traditional media; networks such as Wikinews and Flickr operate quite effectively with their own conventions and protocols. It seems that the waters are muddied when this type of content is integrated within the rigid commercial structures of the news industry.
What came out of this debate? Nothing much; there are acres to cover in the citizen journalism debate but discussion has mainly focused on dealing with the small part of citizen media that is newsworthy and commercially valuable. There was a notable absence of academia in this debate and, more surprisingly, citizen journalists themselves. It would have been good to hear from a prolific Wikinews reporter or at least one of the MediaGuardian readers that contributed to the debate that afternoon.
But then the rest of the UK citizen media landscape has barely begun to be populated yet. Perhaps when we have significantly more alternative local news and community sites and creative media projects operating outside the mainstream press we will have a more penetrating discussion.
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