The author of ‘We the media’ says journalists need to unshackle themselves from growing media empires.
“We’re on the road,” Dan Gillmor said. “But we have a long, long way to go.” In his book, Gillmor addresses the role of Internet in helping independent journalists function within large media conglomerates.
In July, he delivered the keynote speech at the OhmyNews International Citizen Reporters’ Forum. On that occasion, he was inspired to make an assessment of the current state of citizen journalism. The report is published on the blog of the ‘Center for citizen media’, a project that aims at helping to enable grassroots media at every level. 

The bonds of media ownership are stifling innovation, he said. The business models behind the flood of great ideas are uncertain and characterised by notable failures, creating an essential need to deal with the issues of trust, credibility and ethics. It is necessary to update the notion of media literacy and develop tools and training, many media thinkers cry. Some experiments have resulted in useful instruments to make journalism more diverse. Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net, ‘an experiment in open-source reporting,’ turns the notion of journalistic “crowdsourcing” into real. And map mashups, such as the powerful Tunisian Prison Map are tangible examples of how participatory journalism may inspire political commitment.

Today, a search in Google News on ‘citizen journalism’ returns in 700 stories, a testament to the phenomenon of online video and platforms like YouTube. From the (in)famous Macaca video to the Virginia Tech slaughter scenes recorded in real time, “passers-by with cameras are more likely to capture major public events than professionals, at least in the early minutes,” Gillmor said.

Traditional media are embracing the change and starting to host blogging sections and user-generated content on their websites. Projects like Reuters’ partnership with Global Voices Online are designed to bring African blogging to a wider public. Le Monde offers its readers the space to blog. Through such projects, new partnerships between the readers and the editors are forged.

One of the biggest challenges for citizen journalism is to maintain the standards of traditional media while developing successful business models which are important for its survival. Gillmor names two succes stories: Scoop, a Israeli citizen-journalism site that has used OhmyNews as a model, recently made a major advertising deal with Orange, a big telecom provider. NowPublic struck a deal with the Associated Press, and now the news agency is using citizen photos in news reports.
Not all stories have a happy ending though, and he finds disappointing the failure of the nonprofit Radio Open Source, a project that he thought was doing some of the most innovative work anywhere.

With new media, the cost of trying new ideas is heading toward zero, Gillmor said.
This rock-bottom price makes him optimistic about the future of journalism. With the low cost of failure, experimentation and innovation are not tied to the research and departments companies. These process are now happening in garages and around kitchen tables.

E. Delaini

Published: August 5, 2007