Citizen Journalism: Facebook and the Journalist

And then came Facebook

Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are a phenomenon unto themselves, but share many of the attributes of citizen journalism.

A social networking site is a large collection of template-based personal Web sites.  Each is established after the owner fills out a questionnaire about demographics, personality and history.  The software allows quick links to people sharing similar characteristics, creating an instant community of lost or previously unknown “friends.”

MySpace, owned by global media giant Rupert Murdoch, has 110 million active users worldwide.  Facebook, an upstart created by a team of Harvard students, has 60 million users but huge penetration among young people.  It is also shares more photos than the dedicated photo sites like Flickr and Picassa.

Although social networking is primarily a place meet friends, it has a growing news media value. The University of Missouri citizen journalism research team recently examined the perceived credibility of news information found on Facebook.  The researchers found that Facebook users judged news content posted by their friends to be more credible than content posted on the site by traditional news organizations.  The trend even held true for journalism students on Facebook.

Wither the journalist?

With bloggers by the million, photos on every computer and “friends” telling the news, what future is there for journalism?

A very good future, I believe.  Rather than destroying journalism, citizen journalism and its cousins are improving it. The future of both citizen journalism and traditional journalism is the same:  Just journalism with no preface.

The key difference between traditional journalism and citizen journalism in its various guises is the difference between “covering” and “sharing.”

A professional journalist assigned to a story will research the issues, talk to the people involved, check the facts and craft the results into a story.  Then move on.  The job of a journalist is to taste the world, one news bite at a time.

A citizen journalist or blogger, however, lives the story.  It is neither a passing interest nor something he or she was assigned to investigate.  Rather than taking that quick bite of the world, citizen journalists share a bit of their own lives.

Try as they might, that is a type of story telling that evades the professional journalist.  The economics and logistics of full news coverage prevent reporters from experiencing each story before writing about it.

That, however, does not mean that traditional news organizations cannot be part of the Great Sharing.

The incomprehensible size of the World Wide Web is a success, but one that has created new challenges for journalists to meet.  The Web simply offers too many choices for an individual to browse through with accuracy.  As my media critic colleague Vin Crosbie explained, “The Internet is not a mass medium, it’s a massively delivered niche medium.”

As content creators, journalists are now outgunned by millions of bloggers, citizen reporters, Flickr photographers and YouTube video producers.  There will always be a place for the journalist who can craft a story better than anyone else, but there will be a bigger place for the journalist who helps media consumer find the information they want.

This is what I mean by dropping the citizen or traditional preamble to the term “journalism.”  Good journalism in the 21st century is good information from whatever source available.

Wired Magazine contributing editor coined the term “crowdsourcing” to describe the new journalistic practice of going to the public for content.  The term could as easily be “blog cruising” or “Flickr mining.”  The essence of the new journalism is to treat the Internet as a massive wire service upon which billions of stories run each day.  Very much like the wire editor at a newspaper, the new journalist can search through this mass to find content most appealing to his or her readers.

Success at this new journalism requires the skill to recognize value both in a note from neighbor about a housewarming and in a reporter’s detailed examination of new legislation. 

The journalist’s “news nose” is still as important as ever - it just has a broader range of fragrances to sniff.

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