A conversation, not a lecture.
For years, television reporters have entered our living room, popping up on the big screen during breaking news, standing in feet-deep potholes on streets, questioning city leaders, and telling stories. They respond during crisis, knock on doors to find answers, and chase stories day after day.
Despite their hard and challenging work, local television viewership is declining. In fact, it has been on a decline for more than 15 years. In 2001, Tribune Company filed a document with the FCC showing a 25 year track of total late news audience - combining 9:00, 10:00 and 11:00 pm total ratings in all markets.
The first step is to open up to public comment, allowing readers to comment on web articles. It opens the article up for praise, criticism, and new information that the reporter perhaps was not aware of. Reader comments can make the original story better. It might seem like a simple add-on, yet many news organizations don’t allow their readers to comment. Outing writes, “Two-way conversation is an imperative characteristic of most citizen journalism, yet it appears to remain threatening to many people in the journalism and publishing professions.”
The second step up the ladder is a citizen add-on reporter. Some news organizations solicit experiences from citizens with selected stories. For example, a drunk driver causes a car crash injuring several people. A reporter writes an article on the story, and some citizens are invited to post their experiences, including pictures and video, to add to the story. Outing says this approach is not suitable for every news story, but, when appropriate, it can enhance the coverage and offer a deeper story than is possible with one reporter.
A similar principle goes for the next step of citizen journalism: open-source reporting. It’s a collaboration between a professional journalist and the readers of a story. Readers who are knowledgeable on the topic are asked to contribute, ask questions, or do some of the reporting. For example, when a journalist is going to interview an official from British Petroleum about the oil spill, he/she can ask the viewers to submit questions or tips. Reporters can also ask select viewers to ‘perfect’ their article before it is put on the website, and credit them in the article.
Some news organizations also have a viewer panel. They are volunteer viewers willing to be interviewed. A reporter can search for certain characteristics and contact them to participate.
The next level: citizen bloghouse. Outing says the real promise of blogs remains with citizens: non-journalists who are reaching out to the world with their stories and thoughts are a powerful and inexpensive tool. “A great way to get citizens involved in a news website is to simply invite them to blog for it. A number of news sites do this now, and some citizen blogs are consistently interesting reads,” says Outing. News organizations can choose to offer a blog hosting service: aggregating a list of local blogs. If the community already has a website listing all local blogs, it might be interesting to explore partnership opportunities. News organizations can also invite selective local bloggers to write under the news site’s name. Bloggers might be interested in moving over to the news site with enticements such as promotion, a bigger blog audience and visibility, free hosting, or even money.
The Huffington Post recently made a move in the same direction. They announced they’re looking for citizen journalists for their concert blog "in an effort to grow our community of young, passionate citizen journalists."
To make the newsroom more transparent, producers can also choose to share the inner workings with viewers through a blog, videos, or pictures of every-day life in the newsroom.
The next step up the ladder of citizen journalism is a stand-alone website, separate from any core news brand, consisting entirely of contributions from citizens. Several websites are very successful with this approach.
Allvoices, the ‘first true media,’ is an international citizen journalism platform seeing very fast growth. The website describes the community as “an open and highly relevant social media site "unedited by humans", where anyone can report and add their voice from anywhere.”The site was launched in 2008, and according to ComScore’s May 2010 data, it saw 3 million unique visitors - compared to 3.6 million unique visitors for CNN’s iReport (“techcrunch.com,” 2010) Another good example is ‘OhyMyNews.com,’ a website that operates on the principle that all citizens are journalists. Several years ago, founder Oh Yeon Ho was looking for a 21st century version of journalism. He started 'oh my news' in 2002 as a first of its kind in the world. The open source news reporting site has about 55 staff writers, but 80% of its articles are written by regular citizens. The site treats its writers as journalists: they get paid.
In some cases, traditional media turns completely into new media. A year after newspaper 'the Tucsan Citizen' was shut down, tucsoncitizen.com has turned into a citizen journalism blog "written by Tucsonans for Tucsonans."The popular website (3 million unique visitors) is populated with an abundance of articles. More than 50 bloggers and citizen journalists write for the website on a regular basis. The site says: "The bloggers and citizen journalists here provide news, information, opinion, commentary and perspective on the issues, interests and events that affect daily life in the Old Pueblo."
While traditional news outlets are cutting down on budgets, this website seems to be thriving. In a new post today, the site recently announced: "TucsonCitizen.com will now feature up-to-the-minute postings of breaking news, features, sports and financial and business news from some of the largest papers in the country, including the Arizona Republic and USA Today." (“tusconcitizen.com,” 2010)
The next level of participatory journalism, according to Outing, is adding a print edition to a stand-alone citizen-journalism website. These print editions share the best content from the website. Outing says adding a print edition gains credibility: “Especially in a citizen-journalism initiative's early days, the prospect of a volunteer's writing turning up in a newspaper can be more appealing than writing for a still-obscure website.”
However, Outing also admits adding a print edition is sort of “retrograde.” The question is whether the blog-reading audience is interested in opening up a newspaper to read the same stories, without interaction.
The next step up the citizen-journalism ladder is a true mix of professional journalism and participatory journalism. Outing writes: “Imagine, then, a news website comprised of reports by professional journalists directly alongside submissions from everyday citizens.“ The different content would be labeled appropriately for the readers. OhMyNews.com comes very close to this.
The final step: Wiki Journalism. It’s a form of journalism where the readers are the editors. It allows anyone to write, post, and edit a story. There have been several credibility problems with Wiki journalism in the past, but a combination of different news approaches might be the key.
In the ever-changing landscape of news, local television stations are struggling to survive, rejecting new-media and blaming non-interested youth. However, ask any 20-something about the BP oil spill, and you’ll see that the young audience is interested in news, just not in the traditional predictable way local news stations have been lecturing it for years.
Therefore, citizen-journalism might not be the enemy of local television news, but its biggest friend. A good relationship between professional reporters and citizen journalists can create the best storytelling for the community. Media pioneers Jeff Jarvis and Dan Gillmor have talked about this model: “When news becomes a conversation, and not just a lecture. It's professional journalist and community members sharing the online media publishing space, to the benefit of the audience.”
