Defining 'Citizen Journalism'

Dan Gillmor produced a definition for 'Citizen Journalism', and Jay Rosen echoed it, along with providing a comprehensive overview of the term. He includes Steve Outing's 2005 article about 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism. If you ask me, the focus on "Citizen Journalism" is misguided.

Who can do journalism besides journalists? Well, I guess mere citizens could give it a try. Outing described layer 2, for example, as "recruit citizen add-on contributions for stories written by professional journalists."

Clay Shirky writes for a blog called Many 2 Many--I think that name is the right approach. When I worked on e-mail systems in 1990, we had to explain the idea of store-and-forward message communication. When we developed one of the more successful groupware packages, Collabra Share, we were very aware that while e-mail allowed one-to-one and one-to-many communication, groupware was many-to-many.

If everyone reads and many of the readers also write, a large archive quickly grows that captures community knowledge and zeitgeist. Some of it is quite ephemeral, some raw and unprocessed. Many-to-many effectively means quantity rather than quality--this devalues individual pieces of information somewhat. All things being equal, would we choose a few really well-produced thought pieces, or would we choose immediate, comprehensive news?

Comprehensive is important. Great coverage of the city council, but nothing about the school board doesn't work. When it comes to community news, you really don't want to leave anything out. But the old news media--metro newspapers, radio, and television--cover small communities sporadically.

Sharing the responsibility for reporting on your community binds you to your neighbors. That's why 'citizen' works for me--good citizens are naturally journalists in the sense that they are willing to report to the community when they observe things of interest. In this sense, we've had "citizen journalists" all along writing Letters to the Editor. But there are many, mostly professional journalists, who use the term to mean "amateur journalists."

"Certain writers, of whom I am one, do not live, think or write on the range of the moment."--Ayn Rand.

"If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away."--Victor Hugo.

Citizen journalists are not writing like Rand and Hugo when they observe and report for their community. (They may or may not ever write like Rand or Hugo.) The question, in my mind, is how to define what it is professional journalists do.