In the United States they had Dan Rather; in Britain they had 7/7. The ”tipping point” may have come at different times, but old media behemoths know the game is up. Even Rupert Murdoch says so. For the first time there is a consensus around the notion that ”citizen participation” is going to change traditional news journalism for good.
There is less agreement on how that change will manifest itself, but the clues are out there in cyberspace. A new breed of news websites is emerging, diverse in manner but common in aim: to combine the democracy of blogging with the established virtues — accountability, factual accuracy — of traditional news reports. Just outside San Francisco, former print journalist Elizabeth Lee and her colleagues have high hopes for their start-up, iTalkNews.
Lee wants the website, due to launch soon, to do in the United States what the now internationally famous OhmyNews has done in South Korea. That platform for citizen journalists was established in 2000 by the frustrated journalist Oh Yeon Ho, and now makes use of more than 39 000 ordinary South Korean contributors. It claims to have influenced the 2002 general election in favour of the outsider Roh Moo-hyun, who gave his first interview as president to the site. An international English-language version of the site was recently established.
”OhmyNews has provided a successful model that many other citizen journalist sites are using as inspiration,” says Lee. ”But this is something that has been about to happen for a long time. When OhmyNews showed the way ahead, people were ready to go.”
Lee’s iTalkNews‚ which is displaying test stories until it launches — works according to the system developed so successfully by OhmyNews.
Members of the public are encouraged to register and send their stories to the site, from comment pieces on Iraq to reportage on the local high-school basketball team. It is the next step, crucially, that separates these sites from conventional blogging. Once copy is received, a small team of full-time staff — six in the case of iTalkNews — edit for style, grammar and factual accuracy, before contributors vote on which articles should be posted on the home page for all to read.
”Blogging is full-force, but there are so many problems with it,” explains Lee, ”often it’s just a vanity page. We want stories that reflect people’s real lives and concerns, but we also want reliability.”
Lee says that eventually she would like to turn iTalkNews over entirely to the citizen journalists, so that they take responsibility for editing, too.
The site runs with a small team of about 300 contributors, none of whom are paid for their stories, but there are hopes that many thousands will soon join.
”Our site and others like it are changing the nature of news,” she says. ”Traditionally it’s been a percolation from the top down. We want to see news that comes from the people, upwards. I don’t see citizen journalism replacing traditional news, but instead we will have a reciprocal flow.
”Our method is a way of providing news that is much more responsive to attitudes and concerns out there in the world. Even the way we lay it out is indicative of that difference: we don’t have an editor at a desk deciding that one story gets lots of space and another hardly any.”
But iTalkNews is only one of a host of sites taking their lead from the success of OhmyNews, including Japan’s Janjan, New York’s Gotham Gazette and Wikinews, from the people behind online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Questions remain, though, as to whether the success of OhmyNews in South Korea can be matched elsewhere. A series of factors in that country, including a rigidly conservative established press, widespread broadband internet access and a high degree of social cohesion, all played their part in the remarkable enthusiasm there for the site.
Matt Foster, by day a journalist at BBC radio, is well placed to spot the emergence of citizen journalism in the United Kingdom via his site. There have been no attempts yet, he says, at a nationwide citizen journalism platform in the United Kingdom and there are reasons for that: ”We do have a very strong and diverse media in this country and extremely well developed local journalism. It’s hard to see, then, what an equivalent of OhmyNews could offer that we can’t get elsewhere. Plus the major media providers in Britain have been good at co-opting the idea of citizen journalism, as we all saw during the London bombings.”
After all, unlike conventional blogging forums, sites such as iTalkNews must generate advertising income to pay their editing staff, and that means a good readership is a must. While OhmyNews turned a modest profit of $400 000 (R2,4-million) last year, many will think it unlikely that the UK’s diverse population could ever unite around a single platform in the way that South Koreans did.
”Perhaps in the UK we’ll see sites that cater to localities, or niche communities that might not feel well served by mainstream media, such as the gay community,” says Foster.
The next few years will answer many of our questions about the rise of online citizen journalism in the UK. But, whatever form that takes, OhmyNews‘ head of international operations, Jean K Min, thinks the changes manifested by that innovative site — not just to news provision, but to the nature of news itself — are global in scale and here to stay. And that means the established news players must take notice: ”A lot of major news providers, big names in the West, have come to my office to ask for advice. And look around you: the LA Times recently experimented with letting readers write online editorials.
”What is crucial is this: contrary to initial thinking, the internet is not just another channel for news to travel along. Instead it’s a space that everyone can use and that means that news journalism is going to stop being a lecture given by a few ‘special’ people and start being a conversation.”
Jay Rosen, professor at New York University’s School of Journalism and a citizen journalism expert, would agree. He calls this a ”1989 moment” for news media and thinks the hybridisation of blogging and traditional journalism is at the heart of the revolution. But is there not a danger that amid the excitement we will lose the hard-won strengths of professional reporting? Is a small team of copy editors of the kind used by sites such as iTalkNews really able to stand in the place of journalistic rigour and ethics?
”It’s true that we are used to a steady diet of verified information, and that there is nothing that guarantees that it will stay. But the problem of finding a way around the tension between democratic news and reliable news is a practical one for news consumers. It won’t be solved by talking, but by doing. You can bet that people will find ways of getting the information they want and making sure it is true.”
And the future for the major players? That, says Rosen, is too unclear to predict: ”No one knows if the major news providers will survive the rise of these sites and others like them. But just that fact is indicative of the magnitude of what’s happening. These players — Fox, CNN — used to be giants that strode the Earth. Now we’re wondering if they’ll still be here in 20 years.” — Â