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'Citizen journalist' often there first to snap photos
Chris Cobb, Canwest News Service
Published: Saturday, April 12, 2008Security was swift and iron-clad during the anti-Chinese riots in Tibet, but not even a ruthless state lockdown could prevent citizen journalists from making their mark.
Most of the still and video images to emerge from the rioting have been state-approved, but the few cellphone photographs leaking through the security cracks have shown the true brutality of the clashes.
The Tibet story is an especially powerful example of the influence digital photography has literally put into the hands of citizens.
Citizen journalism showed its muscle during the Southeast Asian tsunami in the winter of 2004, when tourists armed with video cameras, digital still cameras and cellphones captured the first images of terrifying tidal waves ripping apart their idyllic vacation spots.
World news was driven and nations mobilized by those amateur images. For mainstream news media, traditionally mistrustful of any material produced by non-professionals, it was a pivotal event.
It's testament to how citizen journalism has developed that CNN has now expanded its IReport.com, an unedited, unfiltered open house for video and still photography from average citizens.
Before the tsunami, the dramatic, flaming crash in 2000 of the New York-bound Paris Concorde had been captured exclusively by amateurs. After the tsunami, there would be more high-profile news dramas: the London train bombings in 2005 and the Virginia Tech shootings last year, for example. Again, as the chaos unfolded, the news was driven by images taken by people at the scene.
In the words of New York University's Jay Rosen, one the first to recognize the potential of citizen or "standalone" journalism, the fundamental obstacle that divided mainstream news media and the wannabes and mightbes, has disappeared.
"The tools for media production have been distributed," he says. "They have left the building."
CNN's IReport.com, a YouTube-style site, began in a relatively limited form in August 2006 and since then has received 100,000 news clips.
It's also testament to the quality and relevance of the submissions that the company's main Internet site, CNN.com, and its main news cable channel, have used fewer than 10 per cent of the contributions.
However, among that 10 per cent was footage from last April's Virginia Tech campus shootings - CNN received 420 video clips from students at the school - and 11,000 images from the California wildfires.
"It starts with the audience," Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide, told the media news service MediaWatch. "Audiences are more and more comfortable participating in news."
It has taken a long time, says Rosen, but citizen-generated video and still photography have effectively become integrated into mainstream media.
"That acceptance (of digital images) was the easiest part," he said, "because you don't have to change a great deal about your organizations, you just have to verify who is the person sending it. So, instead of having photos and video generated by Canadian Press or CNN, it comes from a citizen. It's much the same."
Leonard Brody, co-founder of the Vancouver-based, "crowd-powered" NowPublic.com, dislikes the term citizen journalism, although he's at a loss for a better term.
"It doesn't really describe what people are doing," he says. "Telling someone they're going to be a citizen journalist is like telling them they're going to be a citizen dentist.
"Journalism is an art form and profession. Human beings in the masses are good at recording and being witnesses to events, but, in terms of fact-finding, content packaging, storytelling and writing a 300-, 400-word piece, not many people are great at it."
Consequently, Brody adds, solo/standalone/citizen journalism is largely about pictures produced by citizens motivated by money (apparently the minority), ego and vanity, the desire to promote a specific cause or, potentially the most important, people who just happen to be in the right place at the right time.
Site users love "news mapping," which is basically the collation of links and sources through which readers can piece together major stories themselves.
NowPublic's grand ambition, he adds, is to be first on the scene at any event anywhere in the world.
"Our job is to own the space and time between when an event happens and when it gets uploaded to the Web," he says, "and be at the location faster than anyone in the world.
"We believe we're the fastest-growing news organization on Earth. We have in the hundreds of thousands of contributing reporters in over 140 countries and 5,000 cities. Our reach is deep and our ability to get people to a scene is much more rapid than a traditional news organization."
NowPublic's mainstream model is the collective news agency Associated Press (AP), with which it began partnering a year ago.
Lou Ferrara, AP's managing editor for sports, entertainment and multimedia, says deciding to partner with NowPublic represented a significant shift in corporate thinking.
"Two years ago," he says, "our mindset just wasn't there. It has forced us to think differently. We've been learning how to deal with this new environment."
NowPublic's contributors are not paid, but AP pays the contributor directly if it uses material from the site. So far, it has used very little.
"It's not a lot," he says, "maybe one or two photographs. We've had more success tapping into blogs and social networks like MySpace, Flickr and Facebook."
The current importance of citizen journalism is overblown, Ferrara says. "What isn't overblown," he adds, "is that everyone has a photo device in their hands.
"I have been wondering whether we're ahead of the market on this. Our goal now is to be in a position to capture video when an event happens. It's very old-school in that way. The idea that citizens will one day rule the journalism world is up for grabs."
NowPublic is introducing a new dispatching system involving geo-placement of its contributors - at least contributors willing to share personal co-ordinates - but Brody concedes the business is in its nascent stages,"where blogging was eight years ago."
But, he says, it will inevitably grow.
"Citizen journalism is very different than blogging," he says, "and on any given day, only about six to eight per cent of the active Internet population blogs.
"Citizen journalism caters to the rest. You don't have to nurture a blog, but you can write on issues that are important to you, communicate with others and be a fly on the wall: Drop in on conversations and leave when you're done."
Brody figures that the traditionally conservative advertising industry will gradually grow more comfortable with the migration from print to online and that, he predicts, will have a significant long-term effect on mainstream news media.
"We don't view what we do as a replacement for journalism," he says, "but (in the future) breaking news will be owned by companies like NowPublic and analysis will be owned by traditional news organizations. National newspapers will move upmarket to magazine pricing."
There is sustainable business in print, Brody adds, but the newspaper mentality that print matters above all else is misguided.
"It's like telling your kids you're disappointed they aren't listening to music on an eight-track cassette," he says.
"The question is are they reading good-quality journalism and do you care whether they read it in print, on their BlackBerry or online?"
New York University's Rosen, author of the media blog www.pressthink.org, is less certain how the relationship between citizen journalism and the mainstream media will evolve.
"We expected it to generate resistance and go through a cycle of misunderstanding before any understanding came," he says. "When you're looking at the Web from a huge representational asset like (a major established newspaper), your notion of what you can do without risking the whole thing is so cramped and narrow that you'll never actually develop the practice. That's a problem."
Understanding and trust will come, he says, when mainstream media become familiar and develop relationships with outside solo producers.
If he ever assumed the editor-in-chief's chair at a newspaper, Rosen says he would throw out a challenge.
"I would say, 'Our users - our readers - are one of our biggest assets and we have to build a new newsroom so that part of what this newsroom produces comes from our readers. We will have to learn how to do both.'
