Citizen Journalism: when the audience becomes the reporter
Daniel Bitonti
Joseph Samardzich isn't a professional photojournalist. He sometimes does weddings.
But he figured that since he only lives a couple of blocks from the Carlu, the exclusive Toronto venue where Prince Charles and Camilla were arriving for a reception last Wednesday night, there was no harm in seeing whether a good photo op would present itself. Fearless, with his Panasonic Lumix firmly in his grasp, Samardzich casually blended in with the corps of professional photographers stationed in front of the entrance.
"I wasn't nervous," Samardzich recalled. "I just went right in there and started shooting."
Mind you, most of the men and women he was now in company with were either staffers or freelancers for major publications like the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail, or websites like CBC.ca.
Within hours of capturing the royal couple, Samardzich's photos were uploaded onto mybreakingnews.ca, a CablePulse 24 website.
They certainly weren't the most spectacular images captured by a camera, but they were of royalty nonetheless, and Samardzich could say he took them.
There was one of Prince Charles, dressed in a pinstriped navy blue suit, looking straight into Samardzich's lense.
He also snapped one of Camilla, wearing a pearl necklace with a purple ruby in the middle that was seemingly as large as the British Isles.
Samardzich is a citizen journalist. And he was probably one of many in the crowd that night in front of the Carlu.
Citizen journalism made headlines two weeks ago when arguably the best-known Canadian example of the craft was honoured. On Oct. 27, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression honored British Columbia native Paul Pritchard with a citizen journalism award for videotaping RCMP officers tasering to death Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport. The footage was eventually released to major media outlets and an investigation into the RCMP ensued.
While a debate exists on the exact meaning of citizen journalism, mainstream and alternative media outlets across the continent have honed in on the potential of having a large citizenry armed with high definition cameras, ready to upload images and videos.
But snapping photos and uploading video is just one form of citizen journalism. Innovative reporting techniques continue to shed light on the power of enlisting ordinary people in the news reporting process. Websites, far from the mainstream fold, have also sprung up, encouraging people to break the story themselves.
The audience becomes the reporter
August 20, 2009 is a date that will go down in infamy in the Greater Toronto Area. Early in the evening, a super-cell storm hit the GTA with massive lightning strikes and a tornado that ripped through the city of Vaughan, demolishing homes and leading to the death of a six-year-old boy. It was also a night that will go down in the history books at CP24, a Toronto cable television specialty news channel. A total of 1.2 million viewers watched CP24's breaking news coverage of the storm. The station had never seen such a large audience between the 7pm and 11:30pm time slot, up 150 per cent over an average summer weeknight.
"We had one of the greatest days on television during the tornado and that was due to the fact that we got over 1, 500 viewer submissions of videos and photos that we were sharing live on air as the story was unfolding," said Perry St. Germain, the supervising web producer of CP24.com. "When it first happened, we had a couple of photos come in. But once the viewers saw that we were showing videos and pictures of the storm and the tornado, the floodgates opened."
But then it evolved into the audience sending in video and photos of the damage of the storm.
"People went around after the fact, sending us damage photos. While we had crews on the ground, the crews couldn't hop over fences into people's back yards to show us what happened. It was citizens who felt compelled to share this with us."
Mybreakingnews.com is a relatively new addition to the CP24 media lineup. But the site is very much in sync with what some analysts call the changing media ecosystem. Launched last year, the site is intended to exclusively display user-generated content from around the GTA. As with the storm, content is sometimes even aired on television.
And a quick visit to the site shows that citizens are reporting on everything from fires to road accidents to coyote sightings. Andre Ozegylani, an airport baggage handler and pilot, sent in pictures of a "freak ice storm" at Pearson International Airport last Tuesday, telling the Ontarion that "he takes pictures like that every day at work."
"You'd be daft to pretend that it doesn't exist and that it doesn't help you," said St. Germain. "It's the access to places we wouldn't normally be able to cover due to things like manpower restrictions. Right now, we have hundreds of thousands of people walking around who are potential reporters, for any given story at any given time."
The rise in citizen reporting is a result of what Dan Gillmor calls the "democratization of the tools of media creation and media access." Gillmor is the author of We the Media, a 2004 book chronicling how the Internet is helping independent journalists combat the consolidation of traditional media. The former San Jose Mercury News technology writer is considered by many to be citizen journalism's biggest advocate.
Paul Pritchard's 2007 video of Robert Dziekanski being tasered by RCMP.
"There was a Pulitzer Prize given in the 1930s for a compelling photograph of a car hanging over the edge of a bridge, caught by someone who was not a professional photographer," Gillmor told the Ontarion. "We've come from that being a remarkable event to capture in the 1930s because having a camera was not that common, to the day coming when most people will be walking around with high definition video capturing devices all the time."
Gillmor points to several key moments in recent history that highlight the potential of citizens engaging in journalism. During the London subway bombing in 2005, photos taken by commuter Alexander Chadwick on his cell phone were distributed by the Associate Press and appeared on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
After hurricane Katrina hit the southern United States, Richard Chacón, the ombudsman for The Boston Globe, brought up a dilemma in an editorial.
"Assigning too many people for what might turn out to be a smaller storm is a loss of valuable resources in a time of tightening news budget," said Chacón. "But not having enough reporters and photographers on scene when tragedy breaks leaves readers feeling underserved."
Citizens stepped in to reconcile this very problem. Both cnn.com and msnbc.com set up forums where citizens could share their stories. On msnbc.com, Tara Madison was able to tell compelling story to readers, a story that couldn't have been relayed by traditional journalists given her situation.
"I went to Bogalusa, La., which is 90 miles NE of New Orleans, on Friday to spend time with my husband and his family to help them move," she wrote. "By the time we realized that Katrina was headed our way it was too late. He has elderly grandparents who need oxygen, insulin, and is in a wheelchair and we could not leave. I was forced to remain in Bogalusa to ride out the storm. New Orleans is not the only affected area in Louisiana. Bogalusa was torn to shreds."
An emerging medium
Successes in citizen journalism during events like Hurricane Katrina led CNN to launch their 'iReport' website in August of 2006. Like mybreakingnews.com, citizens simply upload videos and images. During the April 2007 shootings that killed 32 at Virginia Tech University, the network used a cell phone video of police and audio of gunfire that was posted by a graduate student, Jamal Albarghouti, once again giving proponents of citizen journalism another shining example to point to.
And there continues to be a slow but evident shift into more participatory journalism by other mainstream news outlets.
Early this year, the Washington Times, a D.C. daily newspaper with a circulation of roughly 85,000, introduced a citizen journalist's page in their A-section as an additional page of Metro coverage. Each citizen journalist is provided a set of rules for their reporting and news writing, as well as copies of the Times' policies governing ethics, anonymous sources and other journalistic standards.
North of the border, CBC News Vancouver has recently added an addition to their website called 'Tell your Story,' which asks citizens to literally tell their stories. "Witness breaking news? What's happening where you live? What's important to you? What counts in your community?" the CBC asks. CBC Edmonton's 'youCast' allows viewers to submit story ideas and footage in all stages of production. You can submit the story "ready to go" or "simply pitch us your story." Segments air each Monday during the six o'clock news.
Whatever the approach mainstream outlets are taking, Gillmor thinks that not enough is being done to truly sap citizen journalism's potential in the digital age.
"I think it should be a standard part of the journalism tool kit," he said. "My only question is, will it be too late by the time most traditional media companies get around to figuring it out?"
What excites him are some of the lower profile projects that some outlets have actually gotten around to figuring out. He talks particularly highly of the journalistic tool of crowd sourcing.
In 2006, the Fort Myer News-Press, the daily newspaper in Fort Myers, Fl., was following a story that began with a complaint familiar in both big and small towns: there was mismanagement in local government. Certain Cape Coral residents were being asked to pay as much as $28,000 when public utility (water, sewer, irrigation) lines were installed in front of their houses.
Instead of doing months of investigation and then delivering 'final' answers, the Fort Myers newspaper asked readers in both print and online forums whether they had seen or experienced mismanagement themselves. Reader response shocked newspaper editors. Readers phoned in with their stories; some took the investigation into the newspaper's online forum. Some even posted public documents. Others simply shared stories with one another. The result: an unearthing of several layers of evidence of city corruption. City officials were subsequently forced to answer citizen's questions in a town hall meeting and address the issue raised by the investigative piece.
Joseph Samardzich's photos of Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall at the Carlu in downtown Toronto.
Gillmor also points to the less controversial crowd sourcing project that the Bakersfield Californian newspaper website undertook. Readers there generated an elaborate and detailed map that showed all the potholes in the city. In both examples, Gillmor argues, not one single journalist could have undertaken such an enormous project. He says the potential to do a cross-national investigative piece is now very real when citizen journalists are added to the mix.
"Crowd sourcing can range from asking people to ask one single question and then figuring out the results mean, or getting anecdotes or getting facts for a single story," Gillmor said. "But not much of this is taking place in traditional media. But tons of it is taking place outside of it."
"We took all comers and it was pretty successful"
For Paul Sullivan, what it all comes down to is breaking down the traditional barriers that mainstream media has imposed. And mind you, this is coming from a guy who served as western editor of the Globe and Mail, managing editor of the Vancouver Sun and editor-in-chief of the Winnipeg Free Press.
Up until recently, Sullivan was the editor-in-chief of orato.com, a news website where the majority of the content is generated by everyday citizens who are witnesses to the events they cover, and sometimes even the protagonists in their own stories. While it was recently announced that orato.com would be moving away from citizen journalism and back to the traditional model paid professional journalism, Sullivan said that when he had the reigns, his whole take on it was to "aggregate in an interesting way, citizen journalism, ideas, reports and stories."
Under Sullivan, contributors on Orato were pretty much free to post as they wished. Excessively restricting the presentation form of user content was something Sullivan was opposed to. There were of course, simple rules, "rules of the sandbox," as Sullivan likes to put it.
"We would say, if you follow these rules, which were pretty general and pretty open and made common sense, you can post your story on the site," Sullivan said. "You should have seen our filters. There was a vast array of euphemisms for 'go f--- yourself' that I had never dreamed were possible. But our filters would flag that stuff and kick it back."
According to Sullivan, users would clean up their work because they wanted to participate in the processes.
"We took all comers and it was pretty successful. We had surprisingly high visits per month and we got twenty to thirty stories every day," he added.
Orato.com is just one example of a user-generated citizen journalism website in the alternative media world. Dozens are popping up all over the web, engaging in activities that range from citizens uploading video, writing stories, to engaging in crowd sourcing projects like the one in Fort Myers. Take nowpublic.com for example, a Vancouver-based website where users are given all the tools needed to publish a story. In fact there are 'how-to' tutorials on creating slide shows. Like orato.com, the website has all the basics covered: there is a section for local news, world news, culture, the environment, health, style and sports. Contributors can get involved at any level. One story by a citizen journalist, "Afghanistan: Allies uncover cache of bomb making materials," is nothing more than a one sentence synopsis of a story coupled by a long quote from a New York Times article. In only seven hours, it had 60 views and nine comments.
But it is not so much articles like these that Gillmor argues readers and mainstream media should look to for inspiration. It's the local bloggers, or place bloggers, who write detailed accounts about the places where they live and the experiences they have that are of the greatest value. In his estimation, people should look to the alternative media for unique perspectives that people can provide to certain stories – even if it's not as professional.
When Orato.com provided a unique perspective to a story in 2007, the story became a story in itself. The website decided to hire two former sex workers to cover the trial of Robert Pickton, a B.C. farmer who was charged with killing 26 women, many of them prostitutes and drug users from Vancouver's East End. Understandably, there was harsh criticism from the mainstream media. Sullivan, the editor-in-chief at the time, defended his move.
"You've got 300 people accredited to this trial. There's going to be a surfeit of coverage," he said. "Every dimension of the trial is going to be covered. We have to think about it in the context of that fact, that we're a dimension of coverage."
Nearly three years later, Sullivan feels the same way. These hired citizens journalists were women from very similar situations to those that Pickton targeted, he explained. Their perspectives on issues that came out of the trial were unique, and certainly there was value in their interpretation.
"It became very infamous," he said. "But having former sex-trade workers in the courtroom covering [the trial] simply gave a perspective you couldn't get anywhere else," said Sullivan.
Answering the critics
Social networking certainly has a very important place in the citizen journalism discussion. Facebook claims to connect over 250 million people, while some estimates claim18 million people will be tweeting by the end of 2009. Twitter users broke the news of the U.S Airways plane that crashed into the Hudson River, about 15 minutes before the mainstream media alerted viewers and readers to the crash. The first recorded tweet about the crash came from Jim Hanrahan, know in twitterdom as Manolantern, four minutes after the plane went down. "I just watched a plane crash into the hudson riv [sic] in manhattan."
But critics are turning to the recent Fort Hood shooting as an example of citizen journalism going terribly wrong. Last Thursday, when an armed officer shot 13 people at the army base in Texas, the first news of the shooting didn't come from a mainstream media outlet, but from the Twitter account of a solider stationed at the base. With the base in lock-down, mainstream news reporters were getting little, if any, information. But the soldier inside the base was tweeting away. In one of her tweets she reported that the gunman, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, had died.
Turns out she was wrong. He was later captured alive.
And all along, this soldier was encouraging people to send her information to mainstream media sources.
This was not the first high profile case of a citizen journalist getting it wrong. A fake report on CNN's iReport last October claimed Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack. Apple stock subsequently plummeted.
"There are always things you need to be suspicious of…whether or not this is really happening, or whether or not these are real shots. People sometimes like to play with the media because we are a really big target," said St. Germain, about mybreakingnews. He said one way the site protects itself is by trying to distance itself from the user content by having users sign an agreement that says what they submit is their own work. When CNN re-launched iReport last year, they took a highly controversial route, only monitoring the content once its was uploaded. CNN proudly says on its website that stories in the section are not edited, fact-checked or screened before they are posted. Only those stories with the CNN badge have been edited for content.
"To say I am a journalist because I call myself one is to say I am a citizen surgeon because I have a knife," said David Hazinski, a journalism professor at Grady College at the University of Georgia and a former international correspondent with NBC. In 2007, Hazinski wrote an op-ed piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that became a cause celebre for the passionate advocates of citizen journalism.
"Education, skill and standards are really what make people into trusted professionals. Information without journalistic standards is called gossip," he wrote.
Hazinski said he ended up with death threats because of what he wrote. He also said he now realizes that there are a group of people right now who don't know what journalism is, who don't know the tenets of journalism, but yet they want to call themselves journalists.
"In other words, they don't want editors or two source confirmation. They don't want first party verification," he told the Ontarion in an interview. "They just want to say whatever they want and call themselves journalists. I'm sorry I just don't think that's what the profession is."
His primary concern is with new outlets, like CNN, not thoroughly checking the information that comes from citizen contributors, a procedure he says happens regularly with paid professions. He turns to a specific Canadian example that highlights the potential dangers. In 2007 an amateur YouTube video of a ferry battling rough seas was incorrectly identified as a Marine Atlantic ferry battling the Cabot Straight between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Parts of the clip were shown on Newfoundland's NTV, Global's station in Halifax, CTV's Canada AM and several local CTV news broadcasts around the country. As a result of the incident, several passengers cancelled their bookings.
The misidentified Marine Atlantic ferry battling the Cabot Strait. The video turned out to be of a ferry in New Zealand.
But Sullivan sees risks of misinformation occurring all the time, regardless of whether it's citizen journalism or professional journalism.
"I think saying it's true still doesn't make it true," Sullivan said. "I can put together a blog and make it look authoritative, but I could be talking through my hat. But it's the same old story. Don't believe everything you read in print. Don't believe everything you read on a blog."
Sullivan sees resistance to the changing media ecosystem as an attempt to preserve a traditional order that has long had its day – a traditional model that sees paid journalists and major media outlets as the "gatekeepers" of information.
"I'm glad it is to a certain degree that role is compromised through all of this. I don't think we should have gatekeepers of information," Sullivan said. "We should have standards of information. And when we give all of the power to professionals or to mainstream media, to the people who take advertising, to what degree is that a compromise of the truth?"
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