I recently attended a Public Diplomacy Institute discussion at the Jack Morton Auditorium on the decline of the use of foreign correspondents and the rise of the so-called “citizen journalist“. The panel consisted of the editor of NPR, a Media and Public Affairs professor, and several other media experts. They discussed how people at large, and sometimes even news agencies are increasingly relying on regular people for their news, in the form of blogs, podcasts, pictures etc. Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU and as well as a blogger, citizen journalists are ”the people formerly known as the audience,” who “were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way”.
News blogs are some of the most popular blogs on the Web, and sites such as the Huffington Post have gained prominence as sources for ones news, especially in during Election 2008, when web-generated material became a synonimous with the race. Such web “news reports” can be done by actual journalists, but a lot of times they are the work of ordinary people without any professional journalistic experience. They are simply people who feel strongly about current events and decide to weigh in on them. The clear appeal to a blog-style news story is probably its casual tone.
The problem that seems to arise is the issue of bias. Since a blogger could put virtually anything online, a story that is generated may contain erroneous information for propaganda purposes. Reuters ran into such an issue when they used visuals from a Lebanese freelance photographer during the Israeli attacks.
However a positive aspect of this type of journalism is that it can provide first hand accounts on big issues anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes, as was the case for the attacks in Mumbai. Blogs from people at the center of disasters offer a much deeper, personal perspective. They can also provide information in areas where it may not be safe for reporters to go, such as provinces in Iraq where there is still fighting.
So, given the issue of bias that these citizen journalists may evoke, is this a positive trend for the way journalism is done, the media industry, and, most importantly, us.
