Citizen reporters come of age after London attacks

By Diana Day. Posted: 2005-07-08

"Citizen journalism passed the breaking-news test," wrote Robert MacMillan of the Washington Post.

Citizen journalism showed its real potential yesterday after the bomb attacks in London, MacMillan explained. Also notable was the way the British MSM encouraged and integrated amateur participation, he said.

MacMillan rounded up several American media stories about "the technology that allowed amateur reporters to shine" and concluded: "With any luck, the performance of Great Britain's daily papers and their Web sites will take us beyond the blogging-versus-journalism debate. They showed us regular people keeping their wits about them in a traumatic situation, and sharing what they experienced with the rest of us. The news staffs showed that they could blend that with their professional operations."

Comments:

From Jon Garfunkel on July 10, 2005 at 10:32 PM

Thanks-- once again, Robert's summary is among the best researched. Reading danah boyd's blog I heard that "Even the BBC barely updated." and Shelley Powers wrote a terse reaction to the blog triumphalism.

It appears that citizen journalism will run its course much like public journalism: Newspapers will do more of it, and also say that "It's what we've been doing all along!" They may be re-writing history a bit, but it's not completely outside the realm of the media to involve reader/viewer inpput (once again the CJR schools you on this). So when the "MSM" adopts this-- and all power to Dan Gillmor for clearing the path for this-- will it really be citizen-run?

From Robert Greiner on July 11, 2005 at 7:00 AM

It is not initiative but economics -- i.e., the increasing difficulty in finding enough paid advertisers to support a large, unwieldy news organization -- that will determine the future of the media. I'm not the first to say this, but it's true: We are almost certainly entering a phase of journalism's history much like that of the pamphleteers. Then readers had to separate the wheat from the chaff, and soon they will have to again. This is something they should do anyway -- years of training or experience and the support of an institution make reporters less likely to get their stories wrong, but not infallible. The real worry, I think, is that responsible journalists look out at the ruck and perceive a woeful lack of critical thinking skills, and it makes them fear for tomorrow. But I don't know of any clear evidence that people have any worse judgment today than they ever did.

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