The news as food: An analogy for the citizen journalism debate
Jay Rosen recently interviewed Dirck Halstead, editor and publisher of The Digital Journalist, about that publication’s December 2009 editorial, titled “Let’s Abolish ‘Citizen Journalists’.”
Others have done a far better job than I can of addressing the editorial’s arguments (see both story links above), but I want to zoom in on one particular passage:
We advocate abolishing the term “citizen journalist.” These people can call themselves “citizen news gatherers,” but it is no more appropriate to call them citizen journalists than it would be to sit before a citizen judge or be operated on by a citizen brain surgeon.
That analogy struck me as a poor fit. I believe in the value of what journalists do, but it’s just not analogous to the work of a judge or a brain surgeon. So I started thinking: What comparison would make more sense?
Here’s what I ended up with. I think it demonstrates both the function and value of citizen journalists and the reasons why those of us who get paid to do journalism full time don’t need to find the concept of citizen journalism threatening.
Does the analogy work? Let me know.
SCENARIO: GABLE’S GROCERY AND DELI
I’m the owner and proprietor of Gable’s Grocery and Deli, a nice little store in Analogytown, USA. I employ a dedicated team of talented sandwich artists who can make you the best lunch you’ve ever had. I also have a supplier who sends a load of delicious, fresh produce to the store every morning for you to buy and take home.
The grocery and deli: A traditional news organization. The sandwich artists: Reporters, photographers and editors. The produce supplier: The Associated Press.
CASE 1: MRS. JOHNSON’S BROWNIES
Some of my customers would love to have a little dessert to polish off their lunches. Now, I have limited oven space … and besides, my small staff doesn’t have enough hours in the day to add baking to their list of responsibilities. Since profit margins in the grocery business are generally pretty slim, I can’t afford to hire anyone else.
But I happen to know that my neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, makes excellent brownies. She certainly wouldn’t mind a little extra income, so we enter into a little business deal: Every night, she’ll bake a fresh tray of brownies, wrap them up, and bring them by the store in the morning for me to sell. She benefits because she has a place to sell her products; I benefit because I can offer my customers something I couldn’t before; my customers benefit because now they can buy brownies to go with their sandwiches.
Mrs. Johnson: A correspondent or freelancer.
CASE 2: DOUG’S TOMATOES
Doug owns a big patch of land just outside town. He’s known for his huge vegetable garden, where he spends at least two or three hours a day.
This year, Doug has a bumper crop of tomatoes. I mean, the yield is huge. It’s way more than he and his wife could ever eat, even if they canned some for winter. He tells me he’s thinking about setting up a little roadside stand to sell off some of the excess, but I ask him if he’s like to sell his tomatoes inside my store.
Doug: A citizen journalist.
CASE 3: THE HIGH SCHOOL BAKE SALE
The students at Analogytown High School want to hold a bake sale on Saturday. (They’re raising money for new SAT prep materials — just because they live in Analogytown doesn’t mean that stuff comes easy.)
They could set up in the school parking lot or in somebody’s front yard, but let’s face it — they wouldn’t get much traffic besides a handful of parents. So they ask if they can set up their table outside the grocery store. All Saturday, they do a brisk business, and so do I.
The bake sale organizers: Again, citizen journalists.
WHERE IS THIS LEADING?
As the owner of this fictional grocery store and deli, I can respond two ways to, say, the idea of a high school bake sale or Doug selling his tomatoes at a roadside stand.
I can immediately go on the defensive: “What — somebody else selling food in the area? That’s competition! Why would I let you use my property?” Maybe I can even make a stink about them not having the appropriate permits, and tell people that amateurs getting into the food business will ruin everything.
Or I can realize the advantages I could reap by hosting to the bake sale and bringing Doug’s excess tomatoes into my store. In the case of Doug’s crops, people will remember that my store is where they got all those delicious tomatoes last summer. In the case of the bake sale, chances are several of the students will have a parent or grandparent stop by … and not all of those parents and grandparents will be people who’ve been to my store before, meaning I have a chance to get them hooked on my award-winning Reubens.
Am I going to consider laying off my purchasing manager on the grounds that now I have Doug bringing in tomatoes? Of course not. Doug’s tomatoes are great, and they’re a valuable addition to my store, but they’re only available a few weeks out of the year. I need both that seasonal variety and the dependence of year-round produce to make my business healthy, and I know it.
We can view the development of more and better tools for citizen journalism as a threat — or we can see it as an opportunity. I think I have a pretty good idea which way will turn out better.
(All photos from stock.xchng. Grocery store by OBMonkey, brownie by tazzmaniac, tomatoes by edmondo, cupcakes by tam_oliver.)
90K print jobs lost? What’s a “print job”?
Gawker says: “Nearly 90,000 print jobs have been lost in the last year.”
I say: “What’s a print job?”
Newspapers and magazines are considered part of the print publishing category. Which makes sense to a large extent. But I suspect most news organizations have very few people who can be defined as working exclusively in “print jobs.” Which means that even though “internet-based jobs” are excluded from the count, the characterization of everything that remains as a “print job” is not entirely accurate.
I’m looking at The Daily Telegram’s staff directory right now. Except for a few people in circulation and the press room, there’s hardly anyone whose job is exclusively focused on print. In the newsroom, there’s not a single person who isn’t engaged in producing content for two different platforms. But because our jobs span two platforms, they’re apparently considered “print jobs” (and thus, if we get laid off, anyone who’s pushing the print-is-dead narrative will have another statistic to feel vindicated by).
So, do I have a “print job”? No, I don’t. I work for a news organization that operates across more than one platform, and my job is to produce and edit content — no matter what medium it’s distributed in.
“Raise your hand if you’ve ever been in the paper”
My boss from 2002 to 2005 — Jeff Wilson, publisher of The Fairfield Ledger — had a question he would always ask when groups of children toured the newspaper offices.
It was this: “How many of you have ever had your name or picture in the paper?”
Usually, about half of the kids in the group raised their hands.
This stuck with me because it seems like such a simple, elegant way of gauging just how close a community news organization is to the community it serves.
Now, I do think that when a person’s name or photo is in the paper, it should have some sort of significance or context — it should be connected to recognition of an achievement, for instance, or coverage of a community event. (Otherwise, we could just publish the phone book.) And, of course, if getting local names in the paper is all we’re focused on, we’ll be missing the boat in other ways.
But in general, I think the closer a news organization is to its community, the more people will be able to raise their hands and say that the coverage reflects not just life in the community, but also their lives on a personal level.
So if you run a community news organization, the next time an elementary school class or Scout troop comes to your office for a tour, why not give this question a try?
How do you think you’ll do?
5 things I’ve learned about online story comments
This post was originally written for GateHouse Media’s GHNewsroom.com.
1. Comment threads can be part of our journalism.
We’re accustomed to thinking of a story as a complete package: We went out, we discovered what there is to know, and we presented it to our audience. But what happens when someone asks a question we didn’t think of?
Comment threads can be a legitimate part of journalism and a good means of distributing information.
In the past, maybe a reader would call us on the phone to ask — but probably not. Even if someone did call, the bits of information that weren’t originally covered probably wouldn’t rise to the level of a followup story. And because stories used to be our only real vehicle for presenting information, those bits of information probably never saw print.
Now, if somebody asks us a question, we can answer it right in the story’s discussion section, turning that information into part of the permanent record. Take this story we ran in November. The story was about several positions being eliminated at a local school district. Readers wanted more details, so we went and got them. The new details didn’t rise to the level of a followup story, but they definitely contributed to painting a more complete picture and making our coverage better.
Story discussions can also be useful for rumor control. During a recent robbery spree rumors were flying that a local grocery store was among the victims. In cases like this, our comments section serves two purposes. In addition to alerting us to rumors so we can check them out, it also provides us with a way to quickly distribute correct information when we find out a rumor isn’t true.
2. It’s OK to engage.
It can be tempting to just leave comments alone — to keep ourselves above the fray and let people squabble amongst themselves without getting involved.
There’s some merit to that. If reporters get involved in arguments about the subjects they cover, it can taint their objectivity. But if we can go into our forums and play the role of what Steve Yelvington calls the “town expert,” then why not do it?
3. People aren’t saying anything they didn’t say before.
The public officials we cover occasionally complain that our Web site provides a forum for people to snipe anonymously at their actions — for anonymous commenters on a Web site to take potshots at the people in the news, who are very much not anonymous. It’s also easy for us to bristle when we ourselves are criticized.
What we need to remember is that our comment section didn’t create these complaints. People aren’t saying anything on our comments section that they didn’t say before. It’s just that without our comments section, they’d be saying those things to their friends over breakfast instead. We wouldn’t hear the critical remarks, and we also wouldn’t get a chance to refute comments based on incorrect information.
In this respect, comment sections are among our best tools. Instead of people grousing quietly to themselves, they’re airing their grievances in public — and when they’re wrong, we now have a chance to set the record straight.
4. Participating in discussions can turn people from critical to appreciative.
This year, for the first time, we published a pullout special section on Veterans Day. The editorial department wrote profiles of several local veterans, while the advertising department sold tribute ads to people who wanted to recognize a specific family member who had served in the armed forces.
In retrospect, we should have realized that this would look bad, and a letter writer took us to task for it. We could have just let it be. Instead, I posted a comment in the thread explaining how the situation arose and how we’ll probably do things differently next year.
The result: People who previously had been harshly critical of us — both in this thread and in other past discussions — appreciated that someone from the paper took the time to address their comments. And they posted to let us know that they appreciated it.
5. It doesn’t take that much time.
We’re a relatively small newsroom — not the smallest in the GateHouse Media chain, but certainly not the largest either. The prospect of taking on another responsibility, like engaging in comment threads, isn’t something we take cavalierly. Our knee-jerk response is likely to be “OK, so what do you want me to stop doing to make time for this new task?”
But it’s actually not that big a deal.
First of all, taking part in comment threads doesn’t take that much time. Most of the time, when a reader poses a question, I can get the answer just by craning my neck and asking a reporter one or two desks over. Chances are, there’s someone in the newsroom who either knows the answer off the top of their head or can lay their hands on it pretty quickly. And when this isn’t the case, answering the question is usually just a matter of taking 60 seconds to send a two-line e-mail to a school superintendent or city manager.
Second, it’s very easy to squeeze comment management in between other tasks. A little bit here, a little bit there, in spaces like the five-minute gap between the 1:30 p.m. phone call and the 2 p.m. staff meeting that really isn’t useful for much else.
Third, here’s one way to look at it: If a reader called you on the phone to ask a question, you’d answer them, wouldn’t you? Then why not do the same in comments, where your answer can reach all of the people who thought of the same question but didn’t pick up the phone to ask it?
Finally — everything we do takes time. It’s just a question of priorities. If you spend three hours this month helping to create a robust comments section that serves a useful purpose, maybe it’s OK if the tradeoff is that you write one less local editorial this month. You’re not taking time away from producing content — because your Web site’s comments section is part of your content.
Further reading:
- “Why commenting on news sites still stinks,” by Ryan Sholin. Invisible Inkling, Jan. 10, 2009.
- “‘Big Mouth’ comments and editor listens,” by Chris Biondi. GateHouse Newsroom, July 10, 2009.
- “Birmingham Post Reaps Benefits of Responding to User Comments,” by Paul Bradshaw. Poynter Online, Aug. 13, 2009.
- “Plain Dealer Creates New Comment Policy, Encourages Staffers to Interact,” by Patrick Thornton. Poynter Online, Oct. 14, 2009.