Citizen Journalism: The American Migration

Meanwhile in the United States the media both traditional and otherwise were trying to come to terms with Internet technology. Individual bloggers were growing in number daily, but critics argued they did not really provide “journalism.” In 2003 researcher Mark Deuze categorized the new media world into four types of online journalism: 

* Mainstream news sites
* Index and category sites
* Meta and comment sites
* Share and discussion sites.

Mainstream news sites of the time offered original copy produced for the Web or that was taken from the parent medium (sometimes called “shovelware”) content with very little participation from users. Index and category sites do not produce original content, but rather link to it—the Drudge Report is a good example. Meta and comment sites were sites about journalism itself, written by journalists and often containing comment about how the news is framed by various media outlets.

Then there were the share and discussion sites —places for users to connect with one another and exchange ideas in an open forum. There were precious few of these at the time. Slashdot was popular for techies, but little was available to the general public. With the growing adoption of high-speed Internet connections in residences, there was a growing opportunity for interactive news media.

U.S. media watchers combined Oh’s Korean concept with the principles of the burgeoning movement in the technology community to share the source code for programs.  The result was “open source journalism,” news-like information that was freely contributed and freely shared.

The first practical experiment in this was in the unlikely small California agricultural city of Bakersfield.  Mary Lou Fulton was an experienced newspaper reporter who moved into athe digital world first as editor of Washingtonpost.com and a senior manager of America Online.  Tired of the East Coast, she moved back to California to be a member of the independent Bakersfield Californian board of directors.

Fulton persuaded the Californian management to let her experiment with a planned suburban section for an affluent area northwest of Bakersfield.  She surprised most of the newspaper industry by reversing the normal publication order of online and print with the resulting Northwest Voice.  She developed a website filled with locally contributed articles, photos and columns.  Then she printed the copy from the site in a biweekly newspaper.

“The readers responded in interesting ways,” she told me in 2004, “The emotion has taken me by surprise.  People love this paper. The emotion is borne of the notion that people see themselves in this paper and it is written by people in this community.”

Where Oh found success in politics, Fulton found success in horses.  She quickly saw that Americans were much less interested in government than their own lives.  In the Bakersfield area, that often meant saddle horses.  Columns and stories giving tips and information about horses were enormously popular, she said.  The same applied to hot rods, religion and youth sports.  The key was focusing on what really mattered to people rather that the reflections of what mattered.

“There is a real lack of authenticity in our journalism today,” Fulton said.  “Reporters cover education, not schools, healthcare not clinics.  Not writing about you, but about an abstraction.

After following the progress of both Oh and Fulton for, we at the Missouri School of Journalism decided to test the process in a controlled environment.  As a journalism school focused on the newspaper industry since 1908, Missouri was particularly interested in Fulton’s use of an “umbrella” strategy to create synergy with an existing traditional product.  The Northwest Voice used the citizen journalism content to revive an existing product, thus it was not intended to be in direct competition with the parent newspaper company. The umbrella model of citizen journalism sees this the new medium as a way to enhance the company’s products rather than to compete with them.

In the summer of 2004, a team of faculty and graduate students outlined the procedures and technology needed to launch a site. By fall, undergraduate students in an online journalism class were contacting local activists, school officials and other community sources for content. On Oct. 1, MyMissourian.com was online. 

By the time the Missouri team submitted its first research paper in 2005, “open source journalism” had morphed into “citizen journalism” and the term was beginning to get mention in the popular press. 

The goal of MyMissourian.com was always to develop an economic model that incorporated the new journalistic practices into a traditional newspaper organization.  We did that by positioning the website as a content collector on which nonjournalists could publish material with the editing help of trained journalists.  It took a year to work out the kinks, but in Oct. 2005 MyMissourian.com content was ported to a free-circulation edition of the Columbia Missourian each week.  This TMC (Total Market Coverage - also called a “shopper”) edition had been popular with advertisers because of its high circulation numbers.  However, the low-grade content in it had considerably reduced its pickup rate, resulting in “driveway rot.”  Our plan was to use stories and photos by local residents as the compelling content that enticed readers, yet did not duplicate nor compete with the content from the paid daily newspaper.

The hybrid design gave us a unique opportunity to test the power of the citizen journalism concept removed from its more common online technology.  One easily seen impact of adding print to the online site was that after two months in print, registrations to author on the site were triple what the Web-alone site had gathered over the entire previous year.

In 2007, a valid-sample telephone survey of Columbia, MO tested the readership of the citizen journalism free print edition.  The results surprised even the researchers.  An earlier student survey about the pre-citizen journalism weekly shopper was too small for statistical reliability, but it indicated a readership in the neighborhood of 35%.  The 2007 survey showed a 65% readership.  More importantly, it showed that familiarity with the citizen journalism content was the strongest predicator of that readership.  The citizen journalism stories in what news people considered a “shopper” even outdrew the advertising content.

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