In her article, Citizen journalism thrives in Occupy Wall Street coverage, Katherine Travers interviews Phillip Trippenbach, Editor-in-Chief of Citizenside, a citizen journalism site. Citizenside is a website that is a conglomeration of citizen journalism. In the interview, Trippenbach makes some key observations about the usefulness of citizen journalism and its future potential.
First, citizen journalism can give extra coverage to issues that are not heavily covered by mainstream media. As suggested by the title of the article, the Occupy Wall Street protests have received a lot of citizen coverage. While the Occupy Wall Street movement has felt that the mainstream media has not given them fair and adequate coverage, citizen journalists have picked up on the protests and posted a large volume of material online. If there is an issue that the mainstream media does not want to or cannot cover, citizen journalists can make up for it.
Citizenside is website that pushes forward the effectiveness and legitimacy of citizen journalism. While the site is still small now, Trippenbach makes an excellent point about its utility. "Yes you can post your videos to YouTube, you can post your videos to Flickr, but your videos on YouTube are competing with the funny cat video that has six and a half million views, or Lady GagGa videos and all that jazz, so it's kind of hard to get attention in a context like that, where as we are specifically focused on news," said Trippenbach. Having a site like Citizenside helps people filter through the internet and find news created by citizen journalists.
In addition to making it easier to find citizen produced news, the website mitigates one of the shortcomings of citizen journalism: reliability. The editors of Citizenside are professional journalists, who do not edit the content created by users, but do fact-check it to ensure reliability.
Citizenside provides a nice example of how citizen journalism can become more polished and a more reliable source of news.
The occupy movement is an interesting example about coverage. It initially was undercovered (the post you point to is a discussion from October 4) and then drastically shifted, probably about the time people got arrested on the bridge. An interesting question about citizen journalism is how this kind of interplay happens – how does it augment or provoke mainstream journalism, not supplant it.
ReplyDeleteAlso you raise the question of reliability and say that the editors of Citizenside are professional journalists who do fact checking. So what they have is a hybrid of citizen and professional, which sounds to me like a much more viable approach than some kind of “pure” nonprofessional journalism. Of course the question then arises that if they are professionals, who pays them, and how does that affect their editing. In the end, could Citizenside become a professional news outlet that just doesn’t pay its reporters?
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