Who Owns Citizen Journalism? I do
There is a lot of buzz on the Internet about the demise of Citizen Journalism. Too bad because if it dies, I am out $20 a year. You see, I own citizenjournalism.org. Try it, see where it takes you. Maybe I should capitalize on it before it dies completely. I also own publicjournalism.org, com and net. I apparently revel in citizen connected journalism ideas that the mainstream folks are so fond of trashing, but those pesty citizen advocates keep storming the gates with new names for the battering rams.
Here are two articles that got the citizen journalism buzz going: Steve Outing’s thoughtful piece and a Washington Post story by Jose Antonio Vargas. Here are reactions by Faye Anderson, by Tim McGuire, and by Billy Dennis.
Below is a little video by Amani Channel which will help you understand why I am the collector of the public journalism and citizen journalism urls and why I will continue to fight for more citizen say, no matter what the name you give it.
December 2nd, 2007 at 12:25 am
I am thankful for your survey of current exchanges.
Please join Howard Rheingold et al and dig into twitter.com until you can see the river of journalistic enterprise creation there.
You will see then that citizen journalism in the broad sense is in no danger at all.
Those involved in a growing number of variously “going” and “dawning” enterprises evident there may never think what they’re doing is journalism. At least not yet.
You may for a time join my former newspaper associates in beating me over the head with office furniture for calling such work journalism.
But it is. And I am confident that after a time, you will see that it is. If you can fit into that world well enough to find it.
They are using what I think of as Web2.0++ techniques to generate streams of well-researched accounts, and thus far my observations suggest that when they err, the good ones issue corrections.
Steve Outing does recount the failure of an unfortunate business model, but not in my view an overarching failure of citizen journalism.
He seems to me to overgeneralize from his highly constrained model to citizen journalism in general, while otherwise making valid observations.
Neither his comments nor any of the others you did such a truly fine job of collecting will have any effect on the entrepreneurs to whom I alluded. That debate, if it truly exists at all, is I think principally among newspaper journalists.
Digital newspaper journalists, perhaps.
But newspaper journalists nonetheless.
Newspaper journalists are wonderful people whose views and fate are of relatively little consequence to the Web2.0++ entrepreneurs.
Those entrepreneurs are too busy surviving in new markets, using new means of production to do what I suspect your will recognize as almost timeless things.
Too busy to turn aside to consider “our” debate, and they are thus undeterred by any false conclusions we may offer.