The Pitfalls of Citizen Journalism.

One of the primary criticisms of citizen journalism is the lack of accountability and reliability. Some proponents of citizen journalism will counter with the argument that at times citizen journalists will know more about the subject they're writing on than professional journalists, such as in the scenario when a scientist is writing a topic related to his field. However, it still remains that citizen journalism is not practiced with the fact-checking and accountability standards of professional journalism. Now, more than ever, a mistaken story can become a major problem.

The technology that has allowed citizen journalism to proliferate is also what compounds the problems caused by false reporting. On the Internet, an incorrect article can proliferate and reach a plethora of readers in a very short time period. Now, when a professional journalism organization makes a mistake, they will correct that mistake in the next issue of their publication. That correction will most likely reach the same audience as the original article. Even if a citizen journalist publishes a correction for a previous article, it's less likely that most of his audience will read that correction due to the nature of publishing by citizen journalists. Furthermore, the misinformation becomes even more potent if the article has been reblogged and copied elsewhere on the internet.

Articles by citizen journalists may need to be read through an even more critical lens than articles by professional journalists. For example, consider the Steve Miller incident that I recently read about in this article by Cathy Scott. Miller, a writer for an ezine, wrote a joking article about how a 50 pound slab of ice fell off Air Force One and almost hit occupy Las Vegas protestors on the ground. The article was a joke, but the Canada Free Press didn't know that. They pulled the story and included it on the front page of their website and it spread across the internet.

Miller later revealed that the article was satire, but there may be some people still misinformed.

Offering Fresh Pespectives on World Events

How much do we know about the world around us? And how do we really know that we "know"? That is, what if what we thought what we knew about the world around us was not entirely correct? Now I'm not talking about us being in The Matrix or something, but rather questioning how well we're informed by the news media. Most people only know about the occurrences in far away places to the extent that the media tells them about those occurrences. Therefore it is necessary to question whether the media does a good job of accurately portraying those occurrences.

Reading Layla Revis's article, How Citizen Journalism is Reshaping Media and Democracy, helped add some insight on this issue. She begins with an excellent quote from Jay Ruby:

"So long as the dominant culture’s images of the world continue to be sold to others as the image of the world, image makers are being unethical."

The world's media market is dominated by 10 companies according to Revis. That means that the power to shape the world's perception of, well, the world is controlled by a relatively small group of people. If the mainstream media decides to present stories that only fit what the dominant culture thinks the world should be like and presents them in a way that suits the dominant culture, then some people may be perpetually marginalized.

But citizen journalism can change that. Of course there are the questions of reliability and accountability, but looking past those, citizen journalism can change the way that we think about the world. If minorities, the oppressed, and the impoverished get an outlet to share their outlook on the world firsthand, that can change how everyone else who reads their stories views world events as well.

Citizen journalism can also help balance coverage. From my experience, I know mainstream media often covers stories, which, to be perfectly honest, are plain frivolous on the world stage. This is especially true in the United States where we seem to suffer from a lack of coverage of international events. For example, consider the stories that are often seen on cable news networks. All too often they spend hours every day for multiple weeks covering the disappearance of one little girl in the US. Okay, if she's missing then maybe it'll help find her, but even after she's confirmed to be deceased they spend hours covering the story. Not that I'm so cold-hearted as to not care about little girls, but quite frankly there are so many other stories happening around the world that the media could be covering, such as the millions of children living in crisis zones. But citizen journalists can give coverage to the stories that the mainstream media decides not to.

Expanding Citizen Journalism in the United States

Last week I wrote about the media being "The Fourth Estate", another check on the United States Federal Government in addition to the system of checks and balances that the three branches have on each other. But the media doesn't just play a role in checking the power of government, it is crucial to shaping the government of a democracy as well. Media has an incredibly valuable influence on voters, and advertising and press coverage are of utmost importance to candidates. Ahead of the 2012 elections, The Huffington Post is launching an initiative called OffTheBus to increase citizen coverage of the election. In Howard Fineman's article about the initiative, "HuffPost Launches OffTheBus Citizen Journalism Project Ahead of 2012 Elections", he describes some of The Huffington Post's reasoning for creating OffTheBus. 


A long time member of the Washington Press Corps, Fineman admits that the mainstream news media often doesn't cover politics well. 


"We can be trivial, shortsighted, credulous, ideologically blinkered and timid -- on a good day," Fineman said.

Fineman explains why the initiative is called "OffTheBus".

According to Fineman, "In 1973, Timothy Crouse wrote a path-breaking book about political journalism called The Boys on the Bus. The national press, he explained, had become a story, if not THE story, and the paradoxically insulated world they inhabited on the campaign trail wasn't always the best place to get the real story."

The project fosters both centralization, compiling the stories from citizen journalists on The Huffington Post, and diversity, gathering many different stories from different perspectives. Citizen journalists can report some stories better than the mainstream news media and they will report stories that matter more to their locality. Locality is an extremely important point that Fineman makes, and it's something that mainstream media can never offer on its own. Citizen journalist can report stories catering to the wants of small audiences, stories which would be impractical for larger news organizations, even a local news station, to report at times.

It will be interesting to see what stories emerge from citizen journalists as the 2012 election unfolds.