Tiscali Community Who cares

Cry havoc and let slip the blogs of war (or, sense and nonsense about citizen journalism)

Journalists - and this may not come as a surprise - are hypocrites. We lecture the rest of the world on the urgent importance of change in everything from American foreign policy to food labelling. Yet the same journalists loathe the effort and uncertainty of change as much as anyone else; their extensive experience of recommending change does not translate into any higher skills in actually facing up to it. Journalists react to digital technology's disruption of their industry with the same queasy resentment as any other group of professionals required to rethink what they do.

I may not be in a majority in my line of work, but I like the current technology-driven havoc precisely because journalists have to go back to first principles.

'Journalism' came into existence when reliable information was scarce. As newspaper publishing and distribution advanced in the nineteenth century, editors had to supply a demand for accuracy, as well as for speed and entertainment. The collective effort to be trusted came to be the distinguishing mark of journalism. (Journalism's critics of course maintain, then and now, that whatever the stated aim, this effort was a dismal and pretentious failure).

Printing technology made journalism an oligarchy. A few people gathered, sifted and distributed what they defined as news and hoped that many people would buy it and know more of the world as a result.

Four changes turned the scarcity of public information into today's glut: the invention of the telegraph in the nineteenth century, radio and television, digital technology such as email, and finally the internet. Digital communications not only increased the amount of easily-reached information but collapsed the hierarchy of the previous two centuries and upended traditional publishing. Anyone can now publish their thoughts, movies, books, bomb recipes, poetry at little or no cost to a global audience. Old fashioned publishing by the few to the many sits uneasily next to proliferating 'peer-to-peer' networks. Sometimes the two sit in the same media company.

Against this background, 'citizen journalism' means different things to different citizens. As a movement in media politics, citizen journalists would like to dethrone 'mainstream media', derisively labelled as MSM, arguing that the claims made by journalists for the trustworthiness of their work are a con trick, hiding agendas which may belong to proprietors, big business or government. Citizens empowered by democratic technology can at last bypass and expose these manipulations.

Bloggers have vastly increased the transparency of the established media by exposing errors, puncturing posturing and acting as gossip platforms for opinion that would otherwise not circulate so far so fast. These are not all citizens, in the sense of being outside media organisations; many are journalists and many of their sources are journalists.

'Citizen journalism' can simply mean a wider range of sources. Big events that leave media organisations flailing to get microphones and cameras to the right spots are now covered in the first few minutes and hours by a volunteer army of witnesses who send stills, audio and video from mobile phones. Where pundits and established reporters fear to tread - war zones and totalitarian states being obvious examples - the voice of the ordinary citizen blogger may be the only believable witness we have.

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