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Citizen journalists: Online Paul Reveres

By Arianna Huffington

26 February 2009

Profound change on the Internet happens at warp speed. Today’s quantum leap forward is tomorrow’s dinosaur application. The pace is so rapid that it’s hard to see 20 minutes into the future, much less 20 years. The Huffington Post recently hosted a panel on the impact of new media on the 2008 presidential race, and the first realization was that such a panel could not have existed even four years earlier. For starters, HuffPost didn’t exist.

Much more significantly, neither did YouTube, which has become such an integral part of our daily (and political) lives that it’s hard to remember that its founders didn’t throw the switch until February 2005. Viral videos have transformed politics, both negatively (think Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “God Damn America”) and positively (Barack Obama’s 37-minute speech on race has been viewed in its entirety more than six million times). Broadband has changed everything about the way and the speed with which campaigns get their messages out. And none of that was a factor in ’04.

It has also changed the way the news media cover politics and every other facet of life in the 21st century. At the moment, all the talk in media circles is about the death of newspapers. These obituaries strike me as extremely premature. A market for newspapers and magazines will exist at least until those of us who came of age before the Internet die off. This is not to suggest that the newspaper business isn’t changing in dramatic and painful ways. It clearly is. But far from being the death knell of daily newspapers and the indispensable journalism they provide, these shocks are a necessary wake-up call for an industry that for years repeatedly hit the snooze button.

Not any more. Old-media bastions like the Washington Post and the New York Times are embracing many of the ways of new media: adding blogs, streaming video, fostering lively exchanges between editors and readers, and creating burgeoning online communities. At the same time, more and more new-media sites now perform two of the key functions formerly reserved for the old-media establishment—breaking major stories and offering original investigative reporting. And they do both with the speed, interactivity, and transparency that are the hallmarks of the Internet.

Technology will, of course, continue to give readers more and more control over what kind of information they get and how that information is presented. The days of publishing pooh-bahs dictating what is important and what is not are over. The balance of power in content will continue to shift toward consumers and citizens, empowering them to choose and create. And to report. Citizen journalists—armed with laptops, cell phone cameras, and online access from anywhere via satellite and WiFi—are transforming traditional journalism.

These trends were apparent in the recent US presidential campaign. Candidates now routinely announce their candidacy, try out and place campaign ads, and raise hundreds of millions of dollars online. And they are connecting to voters via increasingly interactive Web sites. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s YouTube channel had over 1,100 videos, and my.barackobama.com, his social networking site, attracted more than one million members, who held more than 80,000 offline events. In the process, he engaged a whole new generation of young voters who spend much of their time, and get much of their information, online. It’s where they share their views, their pictures, videos, favorite songs, diaries, and tweets. It’s how they stay connected to their friends, and it’s how they can become connected to the candidates and to the wider world. It’s where they get their news.

At the HuffPost media panel, Black Eyed Peas front man will.i.am, whose musical remix of Barack Obama’s New Hampshire “Yes we can” speech became an ’08 campaign phenomenon, made a distinction between the way people consume traditional media—sitting on a couch—and the way people take in and contribute to new media—as if galloping on a horse, riding along the Internet countryside like online Paul Reveres.

Comment [6]

Agree? Disagree? Let us know what you think. Please include your full name with your comment. Comments may be edited.

“The concept of Citizen Journalism has undoubtedly radicalised the very thinking and practice of journalism, making it community centred and vigorously participative.”

What all this frothing enthusiasm for “citizen journalism” seems to forget is the overall context. I’m not saying there are not substantial positives, but we also need to remember the other side. Consider some “citizen participation” that we can already see, such as that: – most blogs are rubbish – most of the rest are regurgitated banalities – most blog comments are trite, imbecilic, or obscene – similar for YouTube videos – similar for Twitter
And so on.

The result of “just letting it go and seeing what comes out” is much more likely to produce a drop to and massive proliferation of the lowest common denominator than to give rise to quality. In our many already massively over-communicated cultures, do we really need to multiply that even further?

Excellence is not automatically bad.
And broadcasting EVERYONE’S voices is not automatically good.

Posted 14 October 2009, 22:17 by Michael Linehan
Greetings. The noise and the news continues to fill the traditional and social media, slowly but surely enhancing transparency.

But what the media has failed to do in the last decade and today is be a voice of democracy and empowerment.

I was trained by Saul Alinsky’s (Industrial Areas Foundation) executive team soon after he died; and strongly believe the media should be an organizing tool for We The People to hold elected and appointed officials and executives accountable for their folly, gross incompetence and alleged treasonist and criminal behaviors.

We are in the midst of an unprecedented constitutional crisis with vast implications for the U.S., our diminishing democracy and the world that demands, what Native Americans call “seventh generation” thinking.

There has been and continues to be a substantial progress in the unending quest for justice, freedom and accountability creating a foundation for our democratic legacy to be carried forward.

Opportunities for education, meaningful debate and organizing abound. As history notes, our rights are not likely to be granted by grossly incompetent officials, or won by sparse actions: participating in a few demonstrations or pushing a lever in the personalized quadrennial elections and conventions depicted as democratic politics.

Our constitutional tasks require dedicated daily engagements to create, and in some critical cases recreate the basis for a viable democratic culture in which we the people plays vital roles in determining national economic and foreign policy issues from which we have been systematicaly excluded.

Congress, despite honorable actions by a few individual members, is simply a “lobbist induced date rape.”

Opportunities to organize are numerous; however, failing to grasp them will probably have ominous and irreversable repercussions for our nation, the world and future generations.

Treasure Life,

David DeChant

U.S. Marine Vietnam Veteran

Posted 14 October 2009, 18:29 by David DeChant
The concept of Citizen Journalism has undoubtedly radicalised the very thinking and practice of journalism, making it community centred and vigorously participative. The writer has perceptively pointed out how the conventional print media is also adapting itself to this surge of change- by adding online interactive discussion, streaming videos etc, almost like an elearning sensibility. I am not competent to spaek about countries like the USA in this context, but let me concentrate on my country India. Here two things are happening, when it comes to such consensual journalism:1 there is professed citizen’s journalism through blogs like ‘’ Merinews’‘, ie translated literally from the Hindi meaning ‘’ My News’‘, 2 a rush of parallel journalism via a number of yahoo groups where some of the best minds of the country write on caste , racial, religious conflicts, displacent of poor people, govt. policies, the dialectics of the rich and the poor etc.
The first varies from news reporting, to political analysis, to sports and entertainment. The second can be egregiously sharp, blunt, witty, bordering somewhat-alas- on the profane! Communities, religious or secular are not spared, nor are the nitwit politicians, not even some of the sacrosanct cricketers of the country.
And guess what the language of ‘ instruction ‘ (or edification) is ? Why, English of course!

Posted 8 June 2009, 13:02 by Ananya S Guha
I think we are seeing this trend increasing significantly. Interestingly, this phenomenon prevails irrespective of the fact if its a developed or an underdeveloped country. People are using social tools like facebook and twitter to manage massive campaigns.

Posted 25 April 2009, 10:35 by RYM
See the coverage on Twitter of the G20 protests in London yesterday for a great example of this.

Many of the protestors were tweeting live from the scene and uploading photos – giving a realtime newsfeed.

However, as the comment above notes, the brand impact of a trusted name still carries weight – some of the most followed observers were tweeting on behalf of the Guardian and the FT (amongst other newspapers – almost all of whom seemed to be running live Twitter streams)

The Guardian went furthest – integrating users tweets into its own reporting of the day.

Will user generated content find its way into print newspapers?

More likely that print newspapers will gradually erode as content shifts to the web where user generated content is the standard

Posted 2 April 2009, 09:32 by the_infonaut
So very true – more is read than ever before, guidance will remain needed just as information from trusted sources. Under pressure everything becomes fluid, even the mighty bastions of newspapers that continued not to pay attention when their job ads were taken away, then their classifieds and then their subscribers. So caught in their own believes that they didn’t notice that the scene was changing ‘at warp speed’ as ms Huffington so rightly claims. The channels might change, some newspapers will not survive, but the institute ‘an sich’ surely will, they just need reinventing themselves, return to base and realise for whom they actually are writing by accepting their readers into their ecosystems. Which is good, because we need them badly!

Posted 3 March 2009, 11:12 by Thees Peereboom