Center for Citizen Media

A couple of days ago, a reporter for a major newspaper asked the following by email:

My editor has asked me for a story, pegged to the Virginia shootings, that looks at the decline of the traditional journalistic “gatekeeper” role in an age when anyone with a cellphone camera can instantly be called a reporter.

Quite aside from these “citizen journalists,” there appear to be many people in the blogosphere who identify themselves as journalists — or media critics — regardless of whether they have any professional experience in the field.

When a TV outfit asks for video footage from whoever has any, what responsibility does it have to make sure the source is credible? Or are those standards going out the window now that speed and instant competition are paramount?

Has all this led to a decline in long-held journalistic standards?

And should reporters be relying on the casual musings of people on social networking sites, as occurred this week after the shootings in Blacksburg?

I replied:

Credibility is essential to a news organization, or at least some news organizations, and that means applying due diligence to material from the sources we cite and quote.

The excellent question you ask about the video footage is worth asking in more traditional journalism situations, too — and yet I wonder how often it is asked. How many professional reporters ask for identification when they do the “person on the street” interviews? Few, if any, I’d guess. If standards are “going out the window” in this respect, I have to ask when those standards were ever inside the building in the first place.

Things are even messier in an age of democratized media, I grant. But let’s consider those “casual musings” as raw data in addition to early drafts of history. Journalists can sift it and make decisions about whether to use it in the work they then create. But we all have to apply common-sense — and crucially, news orgs should label things correctly so readers/viewers can make intelligent decisions.

At Real Time Investigations, a Sunlight Foundation project, you can follow what Bill Allison calls

sort of a diary of investigations, where you can follow, day by day, what my colleague, Investigative Writer Anupama Narayanswamy, and I are up to as we go about our business trying to make Congress more transparent.

Today’s posting exposes the Agriculture Department’s almost unbelievably shabby record-keeping system that makes public people’s Social Security numbers — an invitation to identity theft.

USDA has been one of the worst-run agencies as long as I can remember. This is one more example.

(Note: Sunlight has provided funding for one of our projects to make congressional campaigns more transparent.)

Alan Mutter calls legendary Chicago columnist Mike Royko “The first citizen journalist.”

NBC wasn’t wrong to put some of the grotesque Cho pictures and videos on the air and the Net. But it made a catastrophic marketing blunder in the process.

The New York Times reports today, “One aspect that clearly irritated many of NBC’s competitors was the impression of the logo ‘NBC News,’ which the network burned into every image from the material.” They should be quietly overjoyed relieved, not angry.

Why? Because NBC has loudly tied its brand to this psychopath’s ravings. People who remember the visual images will also remember NBC — not that the network had an exclusive but rather that the network spashed its own brand on top of nearly pure evil.

At least one employee at an NBC competitor understood this. According to the Times, Paul Friedman, vice president at CBS News, said, “It may backfire for them to be so closely associated with footage that makes people’s flesh crawl.”

It’s called Triblocal, and it’s like several other project already under way or in planning stages at major American media companies.

The more experiments in this arena, the better.

UPDATED

SF Chronicle: Tough decisions on how much to show. Grim video sent by the Virginia Tech killer to NBC News led editors, producers and media ethics experts to resume an uncomfortably familiar debate. “You have to find that line between serving the public’s right to know and the obvious public interest in knowing and understanding as much as we can about this person and how such a thing can happen, and being exploited by his manipulation of you,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The only reason this was a dilemma was that NBC had the videos exclusively — though NBC didn’t know that for certain. For all the network knew, the videos were on their way to the competition.

Putting (some of) the videos on the air and online was a foregone conclusion, however. NBC was no more going to hold a scoop of this magnitude than it was going to show an empty chair during the evening news program. MSNBC’s seeming glee in its repeated showing was unseemly, but nothing surprising for the increasingly tabloidish world of cable news.

The existence of the videos was another reminder of media democratization. This insane young man had the tools of media creation, as increasing numbers of of us do these days, and he used them.

But what he did was nothing new. Theodore Kaczynski’s Unabomber manifesto was a mind-numbing piece of work, but media organizations didn’t argue much about publishing excerpts — and the New York Times, to help investigators, published the entire thing.

Video is different. It can inflame our imaginations and passions more than text, at least in recent times.

And responsible media organizations take care what they broadcast and Webcast. Sometimes they kowtow to governments or fear disfavor. Sometimes, as with the beheading of Nick Berg in Iraq, they do it for more humane reasons.

The difference between this week’s Cho videos and the Berg beheading videos is this: NBC had the former excusively, but the criminals who killed Berg posted them publicly for the world to see. In both cases, however, the purpose was similar: to make a point.

Suppose NBC had known for absolute certain that it was holding the only set of videos Cho had made. Would it have run them?

I suspect so, and don’t believe there was much alternative — even though the weird evil it put on the air didn’t much advance the essential story.

The posting (literal posting, as in post office snail mail) of these materials to NBC was an affirmation of Big Media’s continuing influence. But if another Cho, a few years from now, decides to do this kind of thing — “when” is probably a better word than “if” given the way the world grows more warped in some ways — he’d post them more directly, using the Web, to his ultimate audience: you and me.

Like it or not — and the thought is in many ways terrifying — psychos have access to these tools, too.

At the NMK Forum 07 I’ll do one of the keynote speeches.

We should probably do a blogger dinner somewhere that week.

Over at Just Another Pretty Farce, Nashville blogger Katherine Coble reports settlement of what was shaping up to be a nasty legal disupte. You can find more about the situation in earlier postings on her blog, but the main point is that the threatening party agreed — after the intervention of a lawyer for the Media Bloggers Assocation — to drop the matter.

These kinds of things are happening more and more often. It’s a real worry.

People who care about this and have resources to bring to bear on such situations — including the MBA and a soon-to-launch Citizen Media Law Project, a joint venture between this center and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard — are going to be busy in coming years.

On another blog in early 2005 I posted an essay entitled, “Newspapers: Open Your Archives” — a plea to the newspaper industry to recognize the value it had hidden away behind pay-walls. I’m republishing it below, in part because I think the logic has held up even as newspapers have continued to hold back.

Continue reading →

(Note: This will appear tomorrow as an op-ed piece in the Washington Examiner newspaper.)

Once again, horror has given us a glimpse of our media future: simultaneously conversational and distributed, mass and personal.

The killings Monday at Virginia Tech brought to the forefront the remarkable evolution in media over the past few years. And as we move into a time in which we will be saturated with data, we need to be clear on some of the implications of democratized media.

We’ve had any number of glimpses already in this new century. On Sept. 11, 2001, we read blog postings and watched citizen videos of planes smashing into the World Trade Center towers. During the Asian tsunami, tourist videos showed waves smashing onto shores. A man in the London underground, wielding a mobile phone camera, took the image we all remember best from that day.

The scope of the media shift was clearer again on Monday. Some of the most widely viewed images came from a mobile phone camera aimed at the police response by a student, Jamal Albaughouti. His video made its way to CNN and other media, and was seen by millions.

But others on and off the Blacksburg, Va., campus were also using conversational media in highly visible ways. Social network communications, blog postings, email and a host of other technologies were brought to bear by people who were directly and indirectly part of this huge event.

The students’ words were achingly poignant. They were straight from the source, not pushed through a traditional-media funnel as they’d have been in the not-so-distant past.

They brought to mind a blog post I spotted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by a young man in Brooklyn, N.Y., across the river from the World Trade Center. He wrote, “Now I know what a burning city smells like.”

The democratization of media is not just about creation, though that has been the most notable aspect so far. Putting the tools into everyone’s hands has produced an explosion of media creation, as blogs and sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr show us.

Traditional media think of distribution: making journalism or movies or programs and sending them out to consumers. This is inverted in a democratized media world, where we all have access to what we want, as well as when and where.

I didn’t turn on my TV yesterday except in the evening, to watch a national network’s news report. I wanted to see a summary of what a serious journalism organization had to say about what it knew so far.

Instead, during the day, I used the online media — including the major news sites — to get the latest information, sifting it, making judgments about credibility and reliability as I read and watched and listened. That, too, is the future in many cases.

It’s also worth noting that the citizen media component of this terrible event is not a new to the digital era. When President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas back in 1963, Abraham Zapruder caught the gruesome killing on a home movie camera — footage that became an essential part of the historical record. But the difference between then and tomorrow is this:

In 1963, one man with a camera captured the event on film. In a very few years, a similar situation would be captured by thousands of people — all holding high-resolution video cameras — and all of those cameras would be connected to high-speed digital networks.

That is different.

Remember, too, that the passengers aboard the airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001, were making voice calls to loved ones and colleagues with mobile phones. What if they’d been sending videos to the world of what was happening inside those doomed aircraft?

We will still need journalists to help sort things out. But the “burning city” words from 2001 revealed something.

We used to say that journalists write the first draft of history. Not so, not any longer. The people on the ground at these events write the first draft. This is not a worrisome change, not if we are appropriately skeptical and to find sources we trust. We will need to retool media literacy for the new age, too.