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.
Your point about fact-checking is spot-on. Citizen journalism isn't standardized, and it is rarely safe for journalists to meet in areas of conflict to create standards. However, they know better than most that there's always the internet. Aliases and online chat would be extremely helpful in meeting to establish a set of standards, and I believe that there's enough networking among the upper-tier citizen journalists for those in more secure areas to inform their more at risk colleagues if it would be dangerous for them to access a chatroom. Besides, the discussion would not concern anything anti-government aside from the exercise of free speech for some.
ReplyDeleteI think serious citizen journalists would be very receptive to boosting their ethos. Once the rules are set, all a journalist would need is a separate page declaring allegiance to a code of standards for citizen journalism. Once that code circulates enough, readers will recognize it as a symbol of quality. The citizen journalists who are doing it right will receive due attention, and the less accurate will go ignored.
I read the article on the slip-up - what a joke really! Left me cracking, and recalling how I so nearly took to a piece of onion news when I read it for the first time - they have such skills in creating a convincing facade of its veracity, so that a first-timer might actually buy the story. Truth is stranger than fiction sometimes, so it's not quite hard to believe something as strange as that.
ReplyDeleteBut you're certainly right that there are many pitfalls to citizen journalism which should remind any reader to be vigilant when reading off a citizen journalism site. Citizen journalism, just like professional journalism, fall prey to subjective and biased viewpoints, but on top of that there is the grave danger of factual errors because of a lax standard in fact-checking. It is always hard to undo misinformation from factual errors, and for that reason it is important that readers and news aggregators (like google news) be astutely aware of the trustworthiness and track records of various citizen journalism sites. Just an idea here - but perhaps a "news veracity" algorithm could be developed in which serious citizen journalism sites can be sieved out from those of dubious quality, for the purpose of guiding readers towards more trustworthy, well proven citizen journalism sites.