Running the BBC courses on the beach at Newcastle-on-Tyne
Last month, Dirck Halstead ran a provocative piece in his Digitaljouranlist.org asking whether we should abolish the term ‘Citizen Journalist’.
This fired off the predictable howl-around, including a thread in b-roll.net.
I have had lots of experience with the idea of ‘Citizen Journalist’ for the past 20 years, from Current to CTZN.tv to The BBC to Travel Channel and much more.
I don’t particularly like the term. Under the US Constitution, we all have the right, and indeed the responsibility to be ‘journalists’ all the time. Those who get paid for their work may properly call themselves professionals, but everyone is a journalist of some kind, or should be. The term itself is, in my opinion, a tatutology.
That having been said, as the technology for digital content creation percolates out to the general public and as the web opens more and more platforms for journalists of all stripes to upload their material at whim, we run the risk of being inundated with shoddy or simply false material masquerading as journalism.
The technological barn door is clearly open, but we can do other things.
One of the things that occurred to me was to open free public training in not just the technology but also in the journalism.
Toward that end, I submitted a proposal to the Knight Foundation and yesterday received word that it also had made it into the final round – along with the 1,000 Flipcams in Newark.
The idea will be to run free and open training sessions for those who would aspire to become Citizen Journalists, and to credential those who graduate from the program.
I will be doing this (should it be funded) in partnership with the City University Graduate School of Journalism and Prof Jeff Jarvis, as well as with The Newark Star Ledger and their editors and reporters.
The graduates will be able to submit their work both to the SL as well as to our own Verizon FiOS1 programming in NJ, and be paid for the work that is accepted.
As well, we intend to build an open website to share our knowledge with anyone else, anywhere in the world contemplating becoming or working with burgeoning Citizen Journalists. It is our hope, over time, to create a standard and open curriculum, as well as standards for how to work.
The project is not done, nor have we received final approval. We still have one more round to go.
However, should y0u have the time and/or inclination, I would greatly appreciate if you could visit the Knight Foundation site and review my proposal – not to mention vote it the requisite 5-stars, if you are so inclined.
Many thanks
Here’s the link
2 Comments
Bob January 09, 2010
Thank you for this post. I read the two articles on the Digital Journalist site and was struck by the notion that both authors sounded like children afraid of having a toy taken away. Interestingly, nowhere in the articles did either writer define what “professional journalist” means. So if I’ve been to Iraq with a press pass does that necessarily make me a professional? I think not. Does graduating from Columbia make me professional? Professionalism is more than a degree or receiving a salary. A profession is built upon ethics and commitment to excellence and that was lost somewhere in the articles.
I think they are less concerned with “their” profession than they are with the notion that fewer people are buying print media (for which the authors work) and the prospect of losing work to someone who has not paid their dues by going to Columbia, shlepping gear as a PA or applying for the NYPD press pass etc etc. It’s a shame. I actually contemplated going to journalism school but those articles don’t paint an appealing picture of professional journalists.
christina January 08, 2010
i think the question is more: can we train individuals to be citizens in the way the word was originally intended? and then after that, can we educated people to want good journalism? ideally, a citizen functions for the Good of the society — so s/he would already have an established feeling for what the Good is and could extrapolate truth from that and hopefully be able to recognize it from that template… so maybe creating true citizens would both create an demand for good journalism and an imperative to actively be journalists — professional or not.