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Should Citizen Journalism be “regulated”
By Irfan Essa | January 15, 2008
See the following two Op-Ed pieces in AJC.
- Unfettered ‘citizen journalism’ too risky by David Hazinski
- Citizen journalists: They don’t need to be regulated by Leonard Witt
- See POLL regarding this on the T-Square site for this class.
Topics: Interesting |
3 Responses to “Should Citizen Journalism be “regulated””
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January 16th, 2008 at 12:03 am
Both the Google cache and the ajc link for the first article are essentially dead links. Anyone have a new link?
January 16th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Here’s Hazinski’s article on Google cache:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:RX1mf2vGSaMJ:www.ajc.com/opinion/content/printedition/2007/12/14/witted1214.html+Citizen+journalists:+They+don‘t+need+to+be+regulate&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us
January 16th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
David Hazinski’s article is off google cache as well…
Heres what Leonard Witt had to say in his article. i’m pasting it off the cache.
CITIZEN JOURNALISTS: They don’t need to be regulated
By Leonard Witt
For the Journal-Constitution
Published on: 12/14/07
As the owner of the URL CitizenJournalism.org, I feel obligated to respond to David Hazinski’s opinion piece Thursday about citizen journalism, in which he wrote: “The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend” (”Unfettered ‘citizen journalism’ too risky, @issue).
He doesn’t think the formerly passive news media audience members are very trustworthy. He adds: “Journalism schools such as mine at the University of Georgia should add courses to certify citizen journalists in proper ethics and procedures, much as volunteer teachers, paramedics and sheriff’s auxiliaries are trained and certified.”
I agree with him that journalism schools should offer training for citizens interested in the news media. In fact, the Department of Communication at Kennesaw State University, in which I teach, is about to introduce a new concentration entitled Journalism and Citizen Media. Although we might offer a Citizen Media certificate, I am far more interested in helping future journalists understand the power of citizen media involvement. I am totally opposed to “monitoring and regulating this new trend.”
For example, mainstream media have been guilty of what Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte of the University of Texas calls “censorship by omission.” The voices of the poor, the disenfranchised and minority groups often go unheard. Now citizen participation is an opportunity to get the disenfranchised heard. Who is going to certify which of those voices is most trustworthy? Will it be the members of the journalism profession, who are 86 percent white and almost 100 percent middle class? I hope not.
You can be a great journalist without formal training. In 1996, former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger did a survey of relatively new journalists and 27 percent said they had never studied journalism.
It gets better. Taking a 10-year slice of the major journalism awards and fellowships winners she found “the majority, sometimes an overwhelming majority” never studied journalism. Here are her findings:
> 59 percent of print journalists who won Pulitzer Prizes never studied journalism;
> 58 percent of journalists awarded Nieman Fellowships never studied journalism, and;
> 51 percent of journalists awarded Knight Fellowships at Stanford University never studied journalism.
Citizen journalism, which goes by many names including networked journalism, We Media, distributed journalism and open-source journalism, is a direct outgrowth of the open-source software movement, which Eric Raymond wrote about in his book “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” The cathedral is the old top-down model and the bazaar is the almost out-of-control street market model. Much to his surprise and almost everyone else’s, the chaotic bazaar model produced better and more rigorous software than the rigid top-down model. In the end, this open bazaar form of citizen-created journalism will produce a better informed public and a more rigorous public square.
Models will be formed, just as they were in the open-source software movement, which will filter out the crackpots, vandals and incompetents and it will happen without a certification board. It will not be professional journalism pitted against citizen journalism, it will be a combination of both, and that’s what I will be teaching my students. In other words, I will be teaching them about inclusion rather than exclusion and about freedom of speech and the power of the free press even if that press is a blog owned by a solitary individual publishing to the world.
> Leonard Witt holds the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University.