Talk:Citizen journalism

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I moved this article here from "participatory journalism" because the term "citizen journalism" seems to be somewhat more common. Just now I did Google searches for the terms "public journalism" (34,700 hits), "participatory journalism" (31,600 hits) and "citizen journalism" (45,000 hits). I see that there is a separate article for "public journalism" on Wikipedia. Since that article's content is very similar to the content of this article, I'll fold it into this one and leave a redirect. --Sheldon Rampton 19:34, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Two different things

I don't know what either of these articles were before. But this article now conflates two things that aren't the same.

  • "Citizen journalism" or "participatory journalism" is roughly what is done by ordinary people, or people who aren't professional journalists.
  • There are varying views of what constitutes "public journalism" or "civic journalism", but all of them refer to professional journalists. Maurreen 03:45, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The conflation to which you refer already existed in the "public journalism" article before I started editing, as you can see for yourself if you check its history. I agree that there is a conceptual difference between "journalism BY the people" and "journalism FOR the people," and I agree furthermore that the term "public journalism" originated in reference to the latter. However, in recent usage the term has come to encompass both meanings. (See, for example, Leonard Witt's essay, "Is Public Journalism Morphing into the Public's Journalism?" [1] I have no objection to creating a separate article for "public" vs. "participatory" if you choose to do so and if the distinction you're making can be maintained between the two articles. On balance, however, I think it would be better to have a single article, with some rewriting of the history section to incorporate the point you're making. --Sheldon Rampton 07:41, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
If you want to keep it as one article, how about we call it "Public journalism"? I think that's a broader expression. Maurreen 08:03, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Umm, never mind. On further thought, the article doesn't have enough about regular journalists to make changing the title a good idea.
But I will tweak the history section along the lines you suggest. Maurreen 08:18, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I've just done some tweaking myself along those lines. As for whether it should be called "public" journalism vs. "citizen" journalism, I don't care much as long as there are redirects so that Wikipedia users can find the article by entering any of the terms that refer to it. I chose "citizen" journalism because it seems to be the most commonly used, judging from my Google search. --Sheldon Rampton 08:56, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I like what you did with the history section. I've tweaked the intro to give more distinction between the two. See what you think. Maurreen 17:58, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Reopen the debate?

I'd like to second the original suggestion that perhaps this needs to be two articles. "Public" or "civic" journalism -- meaning that civic-values infused brand of political journalism -- is a very different thing than "citizen journalism," even if the two are maybe (only maybe!) converging. This comes up for me because I just recently created a stub on Buzz Merritt, who's considered one of the fathers of public/civic journalism, and the term "public journalism" is linked -- but it redirects here, to an article that starts off talking about journalism by non-journalists, with which Buzz Merritt has nothing to do. Would there be any objection to dividing these articles? Or maybe just duplicating the relevant portions of this article under the heading "public journalism"? Could also do it under "civic journalism" and turn "public journalism" into a disambiguation page. Lobosolo 02:43, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

  • I'm actually writing an article on the similaraties and differences between "public" and particpatory" journalism with reference to their understanding of key sociological concepts of "civil society" and the "public sphere." When finished I'll be happy to link it. For now, I think this is a fascinating discussion ... 69.22.250.48 16:28, 13 November 2005 (UTC) Chris Anderson[2]

[edit] Unreferenced material

I removed the following statement:

"A more critical definition of civic journalism describes it as a deliberate effort by social-activist journalists to structure their reporting so as to elicit the desired reader reaction, by emphasizing those parts of the story which fit their ideological template and ignoring facts and quotations which don't. Thus, a story on local schools might include the Superintendent's pre-bond-vote statement that "we're terribly overcrowded" but would exclude readily available data from a State Education Department showing capacity exceeding enrollments."

This statement needs a reference or source. Dr. Cash 00:50, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] important link

This is a great page. I think we'll be hearing a lot more about citizen journalism in the not so distant future, especially as students, academics, and people in general begin to debunk the "objectivity myth" in mainstream journalism. This is what has been going on within different subcultures for years, perhaps not initiated by, but certainly fueled by, Jello Biafra's call to "Become the Media". The importance of doing so extends well beyond the punk rock scene. In the last few years we have seen that we can get a copy of IMC's newspapers in almost every major city we visit and we can see what other citizen journalists are doing and witnessing around the world. In fact, in many instances, I have found myself cross referencing articles from independent media sources with mainstream publications to get a feel of what the "real story" is.

One of the groups we should look out for is Common Language Project (www.commonlanguageproject.net). This would be a useful link to the CJ page of Wikipedia. They are citizen journalists who have taken to globetrotting in order to find stories that the mainstream doesn't print, from places that are either underreported or only reported in a neagative sense. Much of what they report is about small, extra-institutional and participaory grassroots work going on in places most of America sees as "backwards" or "dangerous". Their website is slowly becoming a source for people who want to know what is going on in underreported areas as well as a place for "citizen journalists" to write about things they've seen and experienced that don't seem to be getting any media attention. It's up and coming, they are very committed to their mission. Check them out, maybe post an external link. I'm sure lots of Wikipedi-ites would have something to contribute.

[edit] External links (linkfarm)

The external links section of this article is quite long, and is beginning to look like a linkfarm. It appears that everyone that runs a site that even vaguely can be classified as a 'citizen journalism' site is adding a link here.

We really need to trim this section in accordance with the policies and guidelines specific in WP:EL. I've tried to find an equivalent category on the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org), but have not had much luck. Does anyone have any better ideas? Dr. Cash 16:58, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

I have now found a better link to the dmoz.org site for news blogs and such. I removed the directory listing of citizen journalism sites, leaving only general educational sites dealing with the overall topic of citizen journalism, and left the following note (invisible unless editing) to editors in the 'external links' section:

This list is for the listing of umbrella organization type sites or sites dealing with the overall topic and area of citizen journalism. It is NOT for a directory listing of citizen journalism sites or blogs. If you add such a site to this list, it will be removed without notification.
Please read WP:EL for wikipedia's official guidelines and policies regarding external links, and post suggested links to this article's TALK PAGE before adding them to the list.
Examples and directory listings of citizen journalism sites may be added to the open directory project site (dmoz.org), listed as the first entry in this list.

Dr. Cash 17:21, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the link to the dmoz.org site is a rather loose list of blogs, which doesn't include many of the local citizen journalism websites that were formerly listed with this article. I've taken that list and created a page for it on my wiki, SourceWatch, which has a less restrictive policy about including external links than Wikipedia, and I've added a link to the SourceWatch list to this article. Hopefully that solution will work for everyone. --Sheldon Rampton 09:37, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to add Journalism Hope blog - where I concentrate on my personal experiences with Citizen Journalism in the Midwest. Thought I'd check here before adding the link, though. Thanks. -kpaul 70.236.25.149 19:28, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Please read WP:EL, which covers the types of links which are acceptable to include or not. Links to sites that you own or maintain, as well as blogs and other social networking sites, are generally unacceptable. Particularly if your purpose of adding a link to the site is to drive traffic to it, that would be unacceptable. Dr. Cash 22:03, 10 August 2006 (UTC)


Thanks. I think it's relevant (as some of the other blogs on the list), but I guess I have to wait until someone 'nominates' it to the list of links? The reason for adding it is that I run a citizen journalism venture in the Midwest and Journalism Hope (http://www.journalismhope.com) records my experiences and thoughts on Citizen Journalism. I guess I'll just wait to see if someone else adds it. ;) Thanks again. Kpaul.mallasch 23:28, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm having trouble understanding how a comprehensive account of a real-world example of citizen journalism in action is not worthy of a link. Is it because it is a blog post? I understand it's Wikipedia policy to avoid linking to blogs, but that seems rather heavy handed. Is it because my blog is a "sites that primarily exist to sell products or services"? Even if my blog were such a site, the blog post in question (http://www.e-strategyblog.com/2007/08/minneapolis-bri.html) is directly related to the topic of this page. Is is simply because I do Internet marketing and you think I'm trying to drive traffic? I don't need it and I don't particularly care if I get a link to my post or not. I'm just baffled why my post is not relevant and more than a little amused that a citizen journalist trying to contribute a relevant and valuable piece of citizen journalism about citizen journalism to a Wikipedia page on the topic of citizen journalism doesn't qualify. :-) Estrategycom 12 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tools for citizen journalism

I'm building a page on SourceWatch (a non-Wikipedia wiki) for listing some of the top tools for citizen journalism. I would have added it to Wikipedia, but since it will contain a lot of external links, it might not be considered appropriate here. If anyone here would care to contribute content, I'd welcome your participation. Right now there isn't a good single resource on the internet where people can find help in getting set up as a citizen journalist, and I'm hoping this page can fill that need. --Sheldon Rampton 04:37, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Removed. The listings of links to citizen journalism sites were removed since everyone on the planet was adding links to their own sites and calling them, 'citizen journalism' sites just to get a link added, which violates WP:EL. Simply putting the list on another semi-wiki site doesn't solve the problem, and in fact, only makes it worse. Plus, by creating a separate page on another wiki site with 'tools for citizen journalism', you've really found a really weaselish way of getting around wikipedia's no original research policy, not to mention directly violating WP:EL by adding links to sites/pages that you created. Dr. Cash 17:19, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Since I'm involved with SourceWatch, I'll defer to the judgment of others on the question of whether this Wikipedia article should link to it. You've pointed out that it was a violation of WP:EL for me to add a link to a site that I created, and I realize upon consideration that you were right. Sorry, my bad. However, I'd like to respond to a few of your statements:
  • SourceWatch is not a "semi-wiki." It runs on the same MediaWiki software as Wikipedia itself. We have a somewhat different mission and editorial policy, but if we're a "semi-wiki," so is Wikipedia.
  • I can see how you might think putting the list of citizen journalism sites on a different wiki "doesn't solve the problem" of linkspamming, but I don't see how it makes the problem worse. I think in some ways it does help solve the problem, or at least reduce it. SourceWatch is a smaller wiki than Wikipedia, which therefore reduces the incentive for "everyone on the planet" to want to add a link there.
  • Although I accept your judgment that it was a violation of WP:EL for me to add a link to my own site, I don't see how it could be construed as original research. Simply creating a list of things is not "original research," which the Wikipedia policy defines as "arguments, concepts, data, ideas, statements, or theories, or any new analysis or synthesis of published material that appears to advance a position — or, in the words of Wikipedia's co-founder Jimbo Wales, that would amount to a 'novel narrative or historical interpretation.'" If simply creating a list meets this definition, there are quite a few articles on Wikipedia that need to be altered or deleted. (For example, the article on method acting includes a list of method actors.)
  • Wikipedia's policies exist to help make the encyclopedia better, and I think that many people would find it useful if they could use the citizen journalism article to find examples of citizen journalism websites and tools for actually doing citizen journalism. Last week, I attended the "journalism unconference" that Dan Gillmor organized at the end of Wikimania 2006. One of the speakers there was Lisa Williams, who runs H2OTown, a citizen journalism site based in Watertown, MA. She has also been trying to compile a comprehensive list of local citizen journalism sites and has already found more than 300. Her list is not yet available online, but when it does become available, I think this article should link to it. It would certainly be an improvement over this article's current link to Open Directory's list of weblogs, which is a much worse example of "linkspam" than the relatively short and on-topic list that accumulated in this article and that I moved to SourceWatch after it was deleted here. It seems paradoxical that the policy you're enforcing allows linking to a list of irrelevancies such as MoronWatch, ReaganEraChild and StickyBuffalo, while excluding a better-quality list to on-topic information that readers of this article can find useful.
To sum up: I don't particularly care whether this article links to SourceWatch or not, but somehow it ought to help people find those types of resources. --Sheldon Rampton 04:13, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

(a) as far as the original research is going, I was referring not to the initial list, but actually to this page, which, while it is generally a list, goes a little further than just providing a list of sites/links.

(b) it is simply not wikipedia's job to either provide links to websites of citizen journalism or to tell people how to create a site such as this. It's an encyclopedia, it should provide information about the topic.

The biggest problem I have with the whole 'citizen journalism' thing is that it's not really 'journalism' at all. Basically ANYONE on the planet can put up a website, and more and more people have been putting up blogs to preach their own point of view while really having no experience or knowledge on the subject they're talking about. Granted, they have the right to post what they want (just as I have the right to read or not to read what they put up), but using the word 'journalism' to describe it is really an insult to journalists. Dr. Cash 05:23, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

With regard to your point (a), "going a little further than just providing a list" still does not come anywhere close to meeting Wikipedia's definition of original research. You're stretching here. Moreover, you haven't addressed the fact that your edits to this article have effectively prevented inclusion of a reasonably good list of examples of citizen journalism, while inserting instead a really crappy list of examples of websites that aren't citizen journalism at all but just randomly-selected blogs. There is a difference between "blogging" and "citizen journalism," but your Open Directory link ignores this distinction.
With regard to your point (b), lots of Wikipedia articles have links to lists of examples of the topic in question. That's not linkspam, it's part of providing information about the topic. Likewise, lots of Wikipedia articles "tell people how" to do the activity described in the article. For example, much of the chess article consists of information about how to play chess, and it includes an article in the external links section titled How to Play Chess.
Your final paragraph about the "problem I have with the whole 'citizen journalism' thing" reveals a lot about your point of view. Apparently you don't want this article to provide information about how to do citizen journalism because you are hostile to the idea that it should be done at all. You're entitled to your point of view, and it even deserves inclusion in this article, but you need to recognize that your point of view is not universally shared, and you therefore need to avoid pushing it to the exclusion of other points of view. I, for one, disagree with you. While it is true that some examples of citizen journalism are of poor quality, there are also some high-quality examples, and many respected professional journalists - some of whom are mentioned in this article - would strongly disagree with your notion that citizen journalism somehow insults professional journalists. Even if we accept your premise that citizen journalism is of lower quality than professional journalism, your argument is absurd. Are amateur tennis players somehow "insulting" to Amelie Mauresmo and Roger Federer?
As a final observation: If you truly believe what you have written above, you should not be participating in Wikipedia, since everything you have said by way of criticizing citizen journalism can also be said about Wikipedia: "Basically ANYONE ;) on the planet can edit an article, and more and more people have been putting up articles while really having no experience or knowledge on the subject they're talking about. Granted, they have the right to post what they want (just as I have the right to read or not to read what they put up), but using the word 'encyclopedia' to describe it is really an insult to encylopedias." --Sheldon Rampton 06:46, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
Um, no. That's not correct. 'Citizen journalism' = 'blog', nothing more. The whole article probably ought to be merged with the blog article and redirected to begin with. Comparing this to wikipedia is a farse, too. Wikipedia has a far more extensive online community as well as guidelines and rules with an extensive set of administrators to enforce its rules. Of course, the biggest 'weakness' of wikipedia is that there are a lot of users that probably shouldn't be here that want to use the site as their own personal soapbox, or blog, and enforcing this is becoming a problem (no, I'm not accusing you). The vast majority of 'citizen journalism' sites and blogs that I've seen do not have this -- they're run by one or two people that have decided to pony up the money for a domain name to provide a forum for their [rather esoteric] point of view (which is fine as far as the first amendment is concerned, but they really shouldn't be calling themselves a 'news' site -- they're really just putting up editorials). Dr. Cash 17:38, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
This is ridiculous. There is a clear difference between citizen journalism and blogs. Some blogs fit the category of citizen journallism, and some do not. For example, here is the blog of a teenage girl in Iraq that consists of little more than postings of photographs of cute kittens. It's a cute blog, but no one would pretend that it is journalism. On the other hand, websites such as H2OTown or OhMyNews or Back to Iraq clearly are doing journalism. Moreover, some examples of citizen journalism are clearly not blogs at all. OhMyNews is not a blog. Neither are Scoopt and SpyMedia, two websites that let people upload their photos for possible sale to traditional journalistic outlets. MSNBC's Citizen journalism report, which accepts submissions from citizen journalists, is not a blog either. Nor is Wikinews. The reality is that the internet is creating new forms of journalism, some of which are hybrids between old and new systems, and many of which are not blogs at all. --Sheldon Rampton 20:43, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
You still seem to be missing my point. Yes, not all blogs are citizen journalism sites. Blogs are the greater category. Citizen journalism sites fit within the larger category of blogs. Not all blogs are news/editorial-related. Dr. Cash 21:03, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
No, you're missing my point. Citizen journalism is not a subset of blogging, as I made very clear above. There are a number of forms of citizen journalism that are not blogs at all. I listed some of them above: OhMyNews, Scoopt, Wikinews, MSNBC. Here is the link to an essay for the Poynter Institute by Steve Outing, in which he describes 11 different forms of citizen journalism, the majority of which do not involve blogging. There is some overlap between blogging and citizen journalism, but they are two different concepts and categories, and neither is a subset of the other. --Sheldon Rampton 21:14, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Ok, after review, I stand corrected. Perhaps the Poynter article should be listed in the references section, since it goes a long way into defining what this concept is. I see that citizen journalism is a bit more than a simple blog. I've reinstated the link to the citizen journalism websites on SourceWatch. Readers that want their sites on some kind of list, should probably go and add their sites to that list instead (we still have to keep this article as an ARTICLE, not a collection of links, so that's why I didn't reinstated the previous list, which got way too long). The link to the tools for citizen journalism sites is also notable, though we can't really add that to this article because it would be original research, and giving people tools for creating sites is not the purpose of an encyclopedia. However, it does not violate the WP:OR policy to link to sites that are original research, and we can link to sites that do have tools for creating these sites. That's fine. Dr. Cash 04:14, 30 August 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Cited in Wired.com article

The following article: [3]

...links it's reference to "citizen journalism" to this page. Should this be noted on the top of the Talk page? 63.21.87.57 15:51, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

There is a template for adding information about when a media source cites a wiki article to the talk page (onlinesource2004, but this is specific for 2004, not the current year. Not sure why it's just for that year? Dr. Cash 18:47, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Deleted Spam

Yesterday, a link was added to GroundReport. This new article appears to be spam advertising a run-of-the-mill commercial blog site funded by advertisements, with a future launch date!', and is in violation of Wikipedia policy against advertising. Please see Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/GroundReport. --Bhuston 12:14, 17 November 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Added Grubisich Follow-up

Added Grubisich follow-up article. Should have talked about it first here? If so, I apologize. I'm still learning the ropes, so to speak. Thanks. --Kpaul.mallasch 21:56, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Added Section on What is Citizen Journalism

I added more information expanding on what is meant by citizen journalism. The information can, and probably should, be integrated into the rest of the article with some minor restructuring. As this is the first change I've made, I didn't want to muck around with an article that is already very good. Please feel free to chop up what I added and move it in the correct places. --Finious 04:14, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Your information is excellent. Instead of referring to youtube.com you should refer to the youtube article in Wikipedia. Your many web references are excellent and if you put them (or someone else) in cite web template format all the better. You can see examples in the article. Anyways, thanks. This article is important. -BiancaOfHell 07:23, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the helpful advice. This is my first contribution, so I am still learning. I'll go through and correct the citations (unless someone else beats me to it). --Finious 21:57, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Added section entitled legal implications

As a natural follow-up to the preceding discussion, it appeared to me that a brief discussion of the legal implications of citizen journalism would be appropriate.

Bob Casale 15:36, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Alright, good addition. It's unsourced but this article is accumulating facts at the moment. Eventually someone will probably fix her up.-BiancaOfHell 15:44, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed merger

Someone proposed in January 2007 that Social news be merged into this article. There seems to have been no subsequent discussion and nobody has carried out the merger. I've now removed the mergefrom-template since I don't agree with the idea and the proposal seems to be stillborn. — Ksero 07:32, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Opinion

I have not read the entire article, but the following paragraph jumped out at me:

"The time is fast approaching when these legal lines will have to be drawn. In recent times, bloggers have broken too many stories of national interest that mainstream media either overlooked, or decided against reporting, not to be considered legitimate news gatherers and reporters."

This is clearly opinion and not fact (however much I may agree). It needs a good rewrite (or removal) - dcljr (talk) 05:19, 8 August 2007 (UTC) ... Oh, or a source. But even then, I think it would still need to be rewritten. - dcljr (talk) 05:23, 8 August 2007 (UTC)