Are you plugged in? Just how networked are we?

Journalism is becoming more transparent. The process of reporting the news is now a collaborative one. The modern journalist is adopting the role of facilitator. The public now more involved than ever; contributing facts, comment and audio/visual news clips. Jeff Jarvis talks about how, now, the public can even be involved in a story before it is reported.

This is largely thanks to the increasing number of cheap and easy-to-use online tools that could be used for collecting and distributing news. As David Cohn argues, it is simply working out what your audience, your community, needs and the best means to meet those demands. Facebook may even have a place in networked journalism.

Nevertheless, only 1% of the public regularly contribute to news stories. Networked journalism is only in the embryonic stages. The relationship between journalist and community will continue to evolve as the process of reporting the news continues to evolve.

Networked journalism is simply helping to inform the audience faster by using a greater number of mediums to get the story out there. Resistance within the industry to networked journalism – and citizen journalism as an umbrella theme – seems to be missing the point. Networked journalism is not attempting to replace the role of the journalist. I would argue that networked journalism is, in fact, empowering the journalist to facilitate the creation and distribution of news – with greater depth – to their community, using new mediums, more quickly than before.

Just how networked are we? Again, it is an example of new processes and mediums complementing the traditional means of story telling. Ignore the 1% at your peril. Surely the old school journalistic skills remain fundamentally the same for online journalism; the ability to build, and harvest, relationships to gain access to information and stories that can be verified by a trusted source? In person or online.

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Citizen Journalism – is it journalism?

Ask Steve Jobs. Or, perhaps, anybody who owns shares in Apple. Or consider the reputations of the Sky News & Guardian newsrooms after they had both taken the decision to run with a story – a hoax – about a forest fire in Dorset on Monday 20th March 2006.

Rory Cellan-Jones, of the BBC, talks about the “dangers of citizen journalism” in a recent blog following the hoax story on Friday 3rd October about Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple. And Ian Mayes, writing in the Guardian a week after the Dorset fire hoax story was released concludes that “Sky News, the Guardian, and the news media in general, strive for veracity through vigilance. Who can you trust?” Good question.

Accurate, impartial, polished, official, objective, fair, truthful and balanced – adjectives commonly used to describe traditional media journalism and the people who produce it.

The J-word. It’s sacrosanct don’t you think? The word should be protected. The media journalism industry needs to be more protectionist. How can an amateur – untrained and unqualified – be referred to as a journalist simply by virtue of being in the right place at the right time?

Take the letter to Press Gazette by photojournalist Pete Jenkins: “This is presumably to reward people who were lucky (or unlucky) enough to have been caught up in one disaster or another, and happen to own a mobile cameraphone.” Surely he is right?

Take comfort from Ian Mayes words “the news media in general, strive for veracity through vigilance”, values commonly attributed to professional journalists. Professionals versus amateurs… there is no contest – professionals are reputable and tell verified, truthful news. The Dorset fire and the Steve Jobs hoax are examples of how ‘citizen journalism’ is, at best, unreliable and, at worst, simply dishonest. Right?

Unreliable? Yes. But we all know that is a possibility. Any shareholder with an ounce of financial markets intelligence will wait for confirmation on such a story before selling and not simply take the word of “johntw” as gospel. CNN even state “the views and content on this site are solely those of the iReport.com contributors. CNN makes no guarantees about the content or the coverage on iReport.com”. And any newsroom should – in theory – take the time to verify a story before it is released as breaking news.

So there is a difference right? Professional journalist versus amateur citizen?

Why don’t we ask Robert Murat, Sergey Malinka and Mikala Walczuch. What would their opinion be? Or perhaps ask Lori Campbell, journalist for the Sunday Mirror, who shopped Robert Murat to the British Embassy and the Police. Was she just following her professional journalistic instincts? Actually why don’t we ask the same to News International, Mirror Group Newspapers, Express Newspapers and Associated Newspapers? All of whom admitted to making “false claims”. Nearly 100 articles were written. Read by an audience of 15 million. The Guardian quotes his lawyer as saying “the behaviour of the tabloid journalists and their editors has been grossly irresponsible, demonstrating a reckless disregard for truth”. The apology, by the way, came more than 12 months after the original comments made by Lori Campbell. All because Robert was “overly helpful” and “suspicious”.

Jeff Jarvis is right when he asks of citizen journalism, post the Steve Jobs hoax, the question “Is this a story of citizen journalism and its failings, or of professional journalism and its jealousies?”

Citizen journalism is a force for good. Why not allow participatory media to flourish? Our audience has a right to be involved. Why not accept it for what it is – faults included. Surely only the few would want a return to the days of tightly controlled and filtered news production with which people had no engagement with?

Let’s just be thankful that it wasn’t Steve Jobs who offered to help in the Madeleine McCann inquiry. Lori Campbell would have had a field day with that one.

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