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Long live ‘networked journalism’

Citizen journalism is the process by which the group (formerly known as the audience) plays an active role in news and information gathering, reporting, editing and dissemination. Here’s the definition from Wikipedia. It is the process by which people like you and me, outside of official media institutions (e.g. The Times, BBC), start up blogs, post images to Flickr and videos to Youtube, and begin to change the debate by providing access to stories that remain untold by those ‘official media institutions’. Talking of which, this video is entertaining…

But even though the term ‘citizen journalism’ is barely out of its nappy, is it being replaced with the idea and ideal of ‘networked journalism’? The idea of networked journalism focuses not on citizens replacing or sitting alongside journalists as the providers of news; rather, the future of journalism looks to be a future based on the networks of citizens-and-journalists working together. Here are a couple of posts on this topic:

Citizen-journalism start-ups are doomed by John Ndege, founder of Scribblesheet, a citizn journalism site that recently folded due to the inability to find a working financial model.

Networked Journalism by Jeff Jarvis on Buzzmachine.com

Breaking news social media tool for journalists by Robert Hamman, BBC Blogs editor

Sue Robinson’s article in the October 2007 edition of Journalism Practice, entitled ‘Someone’s Gotta Be in Control Here’, illustrates through interviews with 35 editors (in the US) this ‘networked journalism’ at work. One of the best examples is from the Nola.com experiences during Hurricane Katrina, where the forums became not only places for relatives to find each other in the chaos, but places where journalists worked with citizens to tease out the most important stories, and aspects of those stories, for publication, investigation and lead prominence in the print and digital editions of the news. As one editor told Robinson, “journalists and their audiences” were now “disjointed families”. (314)

I’m pleased. One, because we all know what citizen journalism is and no-one has ever really been settled on the idea; and I think networked journalism is more interesting and a more realistic snapshot of the future. I’m not the only one. The decision of the Press Gazette to launch its Citizen Journalism Awards drew a fair bit of criticism, for four key reasons, and mostly around what they were called:

Broadly, there are four objections to the term “citizen journalism”. One objects to the word “journalism”; another objects to the word “citizen”. In between are two objections that the common usage of the term does not overlap with its empirical reality. One says the use of the phrase is overbroad; the other says that it is too narrow.

Read more at the original article.

I’m teaching this as part of the Web Log - web writing module at Sunderland, as part of its Journalism & PR programme. As well as being a term that feels more grounded and more professional, for all those who participate in or experience the development of journalism and information dissemination via the new technologies at hand; it’s also, I’d argue, more interesting for PR students, as the creation of the news agenda has always been about a network of journalists, editors, PR, marketers, business, audience, etc…

Robinson’s article goes on to make the point that it is not just the audience - journalist relationship that is now networked. That model suffices for the means by which the journalist works: “the good reporters are going to be the ones who want to tell a story using all the tools available to them” - i.e., they are going to be the bloggers, the video creators, the podcasters. In other words, the successful journalists are going to be the ones that adopt the practices that we are calling ‘citizen journalism’. As such, what I believe is:

not that concerned citizens are becoming more like journalists; it is that journalists are becoming more like concerned citizens.

Citizen journalism is dead. Long live networked journalism.