Lecture 10: New Media and Journalism: Trends and Consequences

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Lecture 10 New Media and Journalism Trends and
Consequences
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New Media A Recapitulation

• It refers to a group of relatively recent mass
  media such as the Internet and World Wide Web,
  video games and interactive media, CD-ROM and
  other forms of multimedia popular from the 1990s
  onwards
• At the heart of the new media lies information
  processing technology which is based on
  digitization and miniaturization technologies.

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• As a result, new media technologies are extremely
  portable where given its falling costs together
  with its low to medium learning curve have made
  it extremely accessible to non-media trained
  people.
• Together with the fact that the backbone of the
  new media is the Internet where falling cost as
  well as real-time global connection, the use of
  the new media in gathering news has spread beyond
  the confines of traditional journalism.

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Citizen Journalism An alternative way to report
news?
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• Also known as "participatory journalism," is the
  act of citizens "playing an active role in the
  process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and
  disseminating news and information," according to
  the seminal report We Media How Audiences are
  Shaping the Future of News and Information, by
  Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis.

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• They say, "The intent of this participation is to
  provide independent, reliable, accurate,
  wide-ranging and relevant information that a
  democracy requires."
• Should not be confused with Civic Journalism,
  which is practiced by professional journalists.
  Citizen journalism usually involves empowering
  ordinary citizens -- including traditionally
  marginalized members of society.

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Characteristics of Citizen Journalism

• In a 2003, Online Journalism Review article, J.
  D. Lasica defines Citizen Journalism as having
  the following characteristics
• Audience participation (such as user comments
  attached to news stories, personal blogs, photos
  or video footage captured from personal mobile
  cameras, or local news written by residents of a
  community),

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1. Independent news and information Websites
   (Consumer Reports, the Drudge Report),
2. Full-fledged participatory news sites (OhMyNews),
3. Collaborative and contributory media sites
   (Slashdot, Kuro5hin),

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1. Other kinds of "thin media." (mailing lists,
   email newsletters),
2. Personal broadcasting sites (video broadcast
   sites such as KenRadio).

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• There is some disagreement over whether blogs
  should be included in this list, however. Since
  most blogs are not subjected to the same checks
  and balances to ensure that a story is balanced
  and represents fair comment, they are not truly
  journalism and should not be treated in the same
  way as a professional news source.

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Who Is Involved?

• "Doing citizen journalism right means crafting a
  crew of correspondents who are typically excluded
  from or misrepresented by local television news
  low-income women, minorities and youth -- the
  very demographic and lifestyle groups who have
  little access to the media and that advertisers
  don't want," says Robert Huesca, an associate
  professor of communication at Trinity University
  in San Antonio, Texas.

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• Citizen journalism can also be the product of
  circumstance. NowPublic, for example, features
  photographs, videos and written accounts from
  people who are not trained journalists but have
  acquired footage as a result of witnessing news
  events. In many cases citizen journalists are
  just accidental bystanders who have a camera or
  camera phone.

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• Citizen journalists may be activists within the
  communities they write about. This has drawn some
  criticism from traditional media institutions
  such as The New York Times, which have accused
  proponents of public journalism of abandoning the
  traditional goal of objectivity

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History of Citizen Journalism

• The public journalism movement emerged after the
  1988 U.S. presidential election as a
  countermeasure against the eroding trust in the
  news media and widespread public disillusionment
  with politics and civic affairs.

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• Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York
  University, was one of its earliest proponents.
  From 1993 to 1997, he directed the Project on
  Public Life and the Press, funded by the Knight
  Foundation and housed at NYU. He also currently
  runs the PressThink weblog.

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• Initially, discussions of public journalism
  focused on promoting journalism that was, "for
  the people," by changing the way professional
  reporters did their work. A recent study done for
  the Pew Center and the Associated Press Managing
  Editors found that, " Forty-five percent of all
  editors surveyed say that their newsrooms use the
  tools and techniques of civic journalism.
  Sixty-six percent say they either embrace the
  label or like the philosophy and tools,
  suggesting that there are even more
  practitioners."

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• According to Leonard Witt, however, early public
  journalism efforts were, "often part of 'special
  projects' that were expensive, time-consuming and
  episodic. Too often these projects dealt with an
  issue and moved on. Journalists were driving the
  discussion. They would say, "Let's do a story on
  welfare-to-work (or the environment, or traffic
  problems, or the economy)," and then they would
  recruit a cross-section of citizens and chronicle
  their points of view.

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• Since not all reporters and editors bought into
  public journalism, and some outright opposed it,
  reaching out to the people from the newsroom was
  never an easy task." By 2003, in fact, the
  movement seemed to be petering out, with the Pew
  Center for Civic Journalism closing its doors.

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• Simultaneously, however, journalism that was "by
  the people" began to flourish, enabled in part by
  emerging internet and networking technologies,
  such as weblogs, chat rooms, message boards,
  wikis and mobile computing. A relatively new
  development is the use of convergent polls,
  allowing editorials and opinions to be submitted
  and voted on. Overtime, the poll converges on the
  most broadly accepted editorials and opinions.

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• In South Korea, Ohmynews became popular and
  commercially successful with the motto, "Every
  Citizen is a Reporter." Founded by Oh Yeoh-Ho on
  Feb. 22, 2000, it has a staff of some 40-plus
  traditional reporters and editors who write about
  20 of its content, with the rest coming from
  other freelance contributors who are mostly
  ordinary citizens. OhmyNews has been credited
  with transforming South Korea's conservative
  political environment.

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• During the 2004 U.S. presidential election, both
  the Democratic and Republican parties issued
  press credentials to citizen bloggers covering
  the convention, marking a new level of influence
  and credibility for nontraditional journalists.
• Some bloggers also began watchdogging the work of
  conventional journalists, monitoring their work
  for biases and inaccuracy.

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• A recent trend in citizen journalism has been the
  emergence of what blogger Jeff Jarvis terms
  hyperlocal journalism, as online news sites
  invite contributions from local residents of
  their subscription areas, who often report on
  topics that conventional newspapers tend to
  ignore.
• We are the traditional journalism model turned
  upside down," explains Mary Lou Fulton, the
  publisher of the Northwest Voice in Bakersfield,
  California. "Instead

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• of being the gatekeeper, telling people that
  what's important to them 'isn't news,' we're just
  opening up the gates and letting people come on
  in. We are a better community newspaper for
  having thousands of readers who serve as the eyes
  and ears for the Voice, rather than having
  everything filtered through the views of a small
  group of reporters and editors."

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The Dark Side of the New Media
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• The issue of privacy.
• The rise of information conglomerates and the
  control of search engines and net contents.
• Greater access to information democracy?
• The growing divide among information rich and
  information poor in society and around the globe.