We Media: How Audiences Are Shaping The Future Of News And Information

We Media How audiences are shaping the future of news and informationCHAPTER 1Introduction to participatory journalismIn his 1995 book Being Digital, NicholasNegroponte predicted that in the future, online news would give readers the ability tochoose only the topics and sources that interested them.“The Daily Me,” as Negroponte called it, worried many guardians of traditional journalism.To actively allow a reader to narrow the scopeof coverage, observed some, could underminethe “philosophical underpinnings of traditionalmedia.”1The vision that seemed cutting edge and worrisome eight years ago seems to have come partlytrue. The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, TheWashington Post and CNN, to name a few, alloffer readers some degree of personalization onthe front pages of their sites.Millions of Yahoo members customize theirMyYahoo personal news portal with the samenews wire reports that editors use in daily newspapers across the globe. Google’s news page usesa computer algorithm to select headlines fromthousands of news sites — creating a global newsstand, of sorts.And media outlets from Fox News and theDrudge Report to individual weblogs offerthe kind of opinionated slant to the news thatNegroponte envisioned.But is the future of online news simply a continued extrapolation of this trend – news a lacarte? Does greater personalization necessarilymean greater understanding for a democracy?In the view of futurist and author WattsWacker, the question is not about greater personalization but about greater perspectives.According to Wacker, the world is moving fasterthan people can keep up with it. As a result, thereare fewer common cultural references that can beagreed upon. Ideas, styles, products and moresaccelerate their way from the fringe to the mainstream with increasing speed.To combat the confusion, consumers are seeking more perspectives, Wacker says.2 They research an automobile for purchase by spendingtime online and reading both professional andamateur reviews alike.But what are they doing when it comes to news?And what will they be doing in the future?To understand that, Wacker advises, you mustseek out people from the future today and studythem.3 How do you find people from the future?Locate early adopters — people who are usingand appropriating technology in new ways.In South Korea, it looks like one future of online news has arrived a few years early.OhmyNews.com is the most influential onlinenews site in that country, attracting an estimated2 million readers a day. What’s unusual aboutOhmyNews.com is that readers not only can pickand choose the news they want to read – they alsowrite it.With the help of more than 26,000 registeredcitizen journalists, this collaborative onlinenewspaper has emerged as a direct challenge toestablished media outlets in just four years.4Unlike its competitors, OhmyNews has embraced the speed, responsiveness and community-oriented nature of the Web.Now, it appears, the vision of “The Daily Me” isbeing replaced by the idea of “The Daily We.”The rise of “we media”The venerable profession of journalism findsitself at a rare moment in history where, for thefirst time, its hegemony as gatekeeper of thenews is threatened by not just new technologyand competitors but, potentially, by the audienceit serves. Armed with easy-to-use Web publishingtools, always-on connections and increasinglypowerful mobile devices, the online audience hasthe means to become an active participant in thecreation and dissemination of news and information. And it’s doing just that on the Internet: According to the Pew Internet Project, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, generated themost traffic to traditional news sites in the history of the Web. Many large news sites buckledunder the immense demand and people turnedto e-mail, weblogs and forums “as conduits forinformation, commentary, and action relatedto 9/11 events.”5 The response on the Internetgave rise to a new proliferation of “do-it-yourself journalism.” Everything from eyewitnessaccounts and photo galleries to commentaryIntroduction to participatory journalism 7

We Media How audiences are shaping the future of news and information and personal storytelling emerged to helppeople collectively grasp the confusion, angerand loss felt in the wake of the tragedy.During the first few days of the war in Iraq,Pew found that 17 percent of online Americansused the Internet as their principal source ofinformation about the war, a level more thanfive times greater than those who got theirnews online immediately after the Sept. 11terrorist attacks (3 percent). The report alsonoted that “weblogs (were) gaining a following among a small number of Internet users(4 percent).”6Immediately after the Columbia shuttle disaster, news and government organizations,in particular The Dallas Morning News andNASA, called upon the public to submit eyewitness accounts and photographs that mightlead to clues to the cause of the spacecraft’sdisintegration.7ABCNews.com’s The Note covers 2004 political candidates and gives each an individual weblog to comment back on what was reported.8In addition, presidential candidate HowardDean guest-blogged on Larry Lessig’s weblogfor a week in July 2003. (A future presidentof the United States might be chosen not onlyon his or her merits, charisma, experience orvoting record but on the basis of how well heor she blogs.)College coaches, players and sports mediaoutlets keep constant vigil on numerous fanforum sites, which have been credited witheverything from breaking and making newsto rumor-mongering. “You can’t go anywhereor do anything and expect not to be seen, because everyone is a reporter now,” says StevePatterson, who operates ugasports.com, a Website devoted to University of Georgia sports.9Before the Iraq war, the BBC knew it couldn’tpossibly deploy enough photojournaliststo cover the millions of people worldwidewho marched in anti-war demonstrations.Reaching out to its audience, the BBC Newsasked readers to send in images taken withdigital cameras and cell phones with built-incameras, and it published the best ones on itsWeb site.10Weblogs come of ageThe Internet, as a medium for news, is maturing. With every major news event, online mediaevolve. And while news sites have become moreresponsive and better able to handle the growing8 Introduction to participatory journalismdemands of readers and viewers, online communities and personal news and informationsites are participating in an increasingly diverseand important role that, until recently, has operated without significant notice from mainstreammedia.While there are many ways that the audienceis now participating in the journalistic process,which we will address in this report, weblogshave received the most attention from mainstream media in the past year.Weblogs, or blogs as they are commonlyknown, are the most active and surprising formof this participation. These personal publishingsystems have given rise to a phenomenon thatshows the markings of a revolution — giving anyone with the right talent and energy the ability tobe heard far and wide on the Web.Weblogs are frequently updated online journals, with reverse-chronological entries andnumerous links, that provide up-to-the-minutetakes on the writer’s life, the news, or on a specificsubject of interest. Often riddled with opinionated commentary, they can be personally revealing (such as a college student’s ruminations ondorm life) or straightforward and fairly objective(Romenesko). (We discuss weblogs in greaterdetail in Chapter 3.)The growth of weblogs has been largely fueledby greater access to bandwidth and low-cost,often free software. These simple easy-to-usetools have enabled new kinds of collaborationunrestricted by time or geography. The resultis an advance of new social patterns and meansfor self-expression. Blog-like communities likeSlashdot.org have allowed a multitude of voicesto participate while managing a social order andproviding a useful filter on discussion.Weblogs have expanded their influence byattracting larger circles of readers while at thesame time appealing to more targeted audiences.“Blogs are in some ways a new form of journalism, open to anyone who can establish and maintain a Web site, and they have exploded in thepast year,” writes Walter Mossberg, technologycolumnist for the Wall Street Journal.“The good thing about them is that they introduce fresh voices into the national discourse onvarious topics, and help build communities ofinterest through their collections of links. Forinstance, bloggers are credited with helping toget the mainstream news media interested in theracially insensitive remarks by Sen. Trent Lott(R.-Miss.) that led to his resignation as Senate

We Media How audiences are shaping the future of news and informationmajority leader.”11Mossberg’s description of weblogs as a newkind of journalism might trouble established,traditionally trained journalists. But it is a journalism of a different sort, one not tightly confinedby the traditions and standards adhered to by thetraditional profession.These acts of citizen engaging in journalism arenot just limited to weblogs. They can be found innewsgroups, forums, chat rooms, collaborativepublishing systems and peer-to-peer applications like instant messaging. As new forms ofparticipation have emerged through new technologies, many have struggled to name them.As a default, the name is usually borrowed fromthe enabling technology (i.e., weblogging, forumsand usenets).The term we use — participatory journalism— is meant to describe the content and the intentof online communication that often occurs in collaborative and social media. Here’s the workingdefinition that we have adopted:Participatory journalism: The actof a citizen, or group of citizens, playingan active role in the process of collecting,reporting, analyzing and disseminatingnews and information. The intent of thisparticipation is to provide independent,reliable, accurate, wide-ranging andrelevant information that a democracyrequires.Participatory journalism is a bottom-up, emergent phenomenon in which there is little or noeditorial oversight or formal journalistic workflow dictating the decisions of a staff. Instead, itis the result of many simultaneous, distributedconversations that either blossom or quickly atrophy in the Web’s social network (see Figure 1.1– Top-down vs. Bottom-up).While the explosion of weblogs is a recentphenomenon, the idea of tapping into your audience for new perspectives or turning readersinto reporters or commentators is not. Manynews organizations have a long history of tappinginto their communities and experimenting withturning readers into reporters or commentators.In the early 1990s, newspapers experimentedwith the idea of civic journalism, which soughtparticipation from readers and communities inthe form of focus groups, polls and reaction todaily news stories. Most of these early projectscentered around election coverage. Later, news-papers sought to involve communities in majordeliberations on public problems such as race,development and crime.According to a report from the Pew Center forCivic Journalism, at least 20 percent of the 1,500daily U.S. newspapers practiced some form ofcivic journalism between 1994 and 2001. Nearlyall said it had a positive effect on the community.12Civic journalism has a somewhat controversialreputation, and not everyone is convinced of itsbenefits. While civic journalism actively tries toencourage participation, the news organizationmaintains a high degree of control by setting theagenda, choosing the participants and moderating the conversation. Some feel that civic journalism is often too broad, focusing on large issuessuch as crime and politics, and not highly responsive to the day-to-day needs of the audience.13Yet, the seed from which civic journalismgrows is dialogue and conversation. Similarly, adefining characteristic of participatory journalism is conversation. However, there is no centralnews organization controlling the exchange ofinformation. Conversation is the mechanismthat turns the tables on the traditional roles ofjournalism and creates a dynamic, egalitariangive-and-take ethic.The fluidity of this approach puts more emphasis on the publishing of information rather thanthe filtering. Conversations happen in the community for all to see. In contrast, traditional newsorganizations are set up to filter informationbefore they publish it. It might be collaborativeamong the editors and reporters, but the debatesare not open to public scrutiny or involvement.John Seely Brown, chief scientist of XeroxCorp., further elaborates on participatory journalism in the book The Elements of Journalism:“In an era when anyone can be a reporter or commentator on the Web, ‘you move to a two-wayjournalism.’ The journalist becomes a ‘forumleader,’ or a mediator rather than simply a teacher or lecturer. The audience becomes not consumers, but ‘pro-sumers,’ a hybrid of consumerand producer.”14Seely Brown’s description suggests a symbioticrelationship, which we are already seeing. Butparticipatory journalism does not show evidenceof needing a classically trained “journalist” to bethe mediator or facilitator. Plenty of weblogs, forums and online communities appear to functioneffectively without one.This raises some important questions: If parIntroduction to participatory journalism 9

We Media How audiences are shaping the future of news and information ticipatory journalism has risen without the directhelp of trained journalists or news industry initiatives, what role will mainstream media play?And are mainstream media willing to relinquishsome control and actively collaborate with theiraudiences? Or will an informed and empoweredconsumer begin to frame the news agenda fromthe grassroots? And, will journalism’s valuesendure?Journalism at a crossroadsIn his 1996 book News Values, former Chicago10 Introduction to participatory journalismTribune publisher Jack Fuller summed it up well:“The new interactive medium both threatens thestatus quo and promises an exciting new way oflearning about the world.” This deftly describesboth camps of opinion concerning participationby the audience in journalism.15It’s not just the Internet that threatens the status quo of the news business. In their 2001 bookThe Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach andTom Rosenstiel make a compelling argumentthat the news business is undergoing “a momentous transition.”

We Media How audiences are shaping the future of news and informationOhmyNews is themost influentialonline news sitein South Korea,attracting anestimated 2million readersa day. It isproduced bymore than 26,000registered citizenjournalists.According to the authors, each time there hasbeen a period of significant, social, economicand technological change, a transformation innews occurred. This happened in the 1830s-40swith the advent of the telegraph; the 1880s witha drop in paper prices and a wave of immigration;the 1920s with radio and the rise of gossip and celebrity culture; the 1950s at the onset of the ColdWar and television.The arrival of cable, followed by the Internetand mobile technologies, has brought the latest upheaval in news. And this time, the changein news may be even more dramatic. Kovachand Rosenstiel explain, “For the first time inour history, the news increasingly is producedby companies outside journalism, and this neweconomic organization is important. We are facing the possibility that independent news will bereplaced by self-interested commercialism posing as news.”16Kovach and Rosenstiel argue that new technology, along with globalization and the conglomeration of media, is causing a shift away fromjournalism that is connected to citizen buildingand one that supports a healthy democracy.Clearly, journalism is in the process of redefining itself, adjusting to the disruptive forces surrounding it. So it’s no surprise that discussionsabout forms of participatory journalism, such asweblogs, are frequently consumed by defensivedebates about what is journalism and who canlegitimately call themselves a journalist.While debating what makes for good journalismis worthwhile, and is clearly needed, it preventsthe discussion from advancing to any analysisabout the greater good that can be gained fromaudience participation in news. Furthermore, thedebate often exacerbates the differences primarily in processes, overlooking obvious similarities.If we take a closer look at the basic tasks andvalues of traditional journalism, the differencesbecome less striking.From a task perspective, journalism is seenas “the profession of gathering, editing, andpublishing news reports and related articles fornewspapers, magazines, television, or radio.”17In terms of journalism’s key values, thereis much debate. After extensive interviewswith hundreds of U.S. journalists, Kovach andRosenstiel say that terms such as fairness, balance and objectivity are too vague to rise to essential elements of this profession. From theirresearch, they distilled this value: “The primarypurpose of journalism is to provide citizens withthe information they need to be free and self-governing.”18In the case of the aforementioned South Koreannews site, we see that traditional journalism’sbasic tasks and values are central to its ethos.The difference essentially boils down to a redistribution of control – a democratization of media.“With OhmyNews, we wanted to say goodbye to20th-century journalism where people only sawthings through the eyes of the mainstream, conservative media,” said Oh Yeon-ho, editor andfounder of South Korea’s Ohmynews.com.19Introduction to participatory journalism 11

We Media How audiences are shaping the future of news and information “The main concept is that every citizen can bea reporter,” Yeon-ho says. “A reporter is the onewho has the news and who is trying to informothers.”20The new evolving media ecosystemThe most obvious difference between participatory journalism and traditional journalism is thedifferent structure and organization that producethem.Traditional media are created by hierarchicalorganizations that are built for commerce. Theirbusiness models are broadcast and advertisingfocused. They value rigorous editorial workflow,profitability and integrity. Participatory journalism is created by networked communities thatvalue conversation, collaboration and egalitari12 Introduction to participatory journalismanism over profitability.Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New YorkUniversity who has consulted on the social andeconomic effects of Internet technologies, seesthe difference this way: “The order of things inbroadcast is ‘filter, then publish.’ The order incommunities is ‘publish, then filter.’ If you goto a dinner party, you don’t submit your potential comments to the hosts, so that they can tellyou which ones are good enough to air beforethe group, but this is how broadcast works everyday. Writers submit their stories in advance, tobe edited or rejected before the public ever seesthem. Participants in a community, by contrast,say what they have to say, and the good is sortedfrom the mediocre after the fact.”21Ma

Google's news page uses a computer algorithm to select headlines from thousands of news sites — creating a global news-stand, of sorts. And media outlets from Fox News and the Drudge Report to individual weblogs offer the kind of opinionated slant to the news that Negroponte envisioned. But is the future of online news simply a con-