Great piece from Steve Outing on Editor & Publisher about how newspapers and other media can take advantage of the current (and permanent?) citizen journalist craze.
My biggest problems with CJ is the potential for credibility, integrity and basic honesty (at least, as honest as any naturally biased person can be. We all have our biases.).
But, Outing has a great section regarding whether or not to train CJs, or citJs, as he refers to them:
“I can’t help but think that that’s a good idea. Consider holding public seminars that educate community members about your citJ site and how they can contribute, and offer up some editors to give advice about producing good-quality content.”
The counter point to training CJs is:
“We Media’s [Chris] Willis concurs: ‘There is little hard evidence to suggest that your average citizen is interested in being a journalist in the traditional sense.’
So perhaps we really want to train community members to use our citJ sites to ’share their experiences,’ not pretend to be journalists.”
I really don’t care if CJs are journalist “in the traditional sense.” I just don’t want propoganda in the “news” of what I read.
So, if CJ is not the proper terminology, maybe as I noted recently, they should be citizen columnists. Or their stories labels “citizen scoops?”
Whatever CJ evolves to, there will be notable differences in CJs reporting on professional media sites and papers/broadcast, and CJs who act as their own publishers. Of course, there’s the third category of CJs, stand-alone sites who use nothing but CJs (like OhMyNews.com and Orato.com).
–Mike
Technorati tags: Citizen Journalism, Journalism
