Citizen Journalism: Humble Beginnings

While the term “citizen journalism” is new, the concept is literally as old as the rocks.  The cave dweller who painted a bison on his cavern wall was unlikely a fulltime chronicler of that eon’s events - he was more likely a hunter who wanted to share his adventure.

There is an argument to make that the citizen journalist title is a variant of Martin Luther’s observation (paraphrased) that “every man is a priest.” Luther’s secular inspiration was Johannes Gutenberg, who invented a moveable-type printing press 30 years before the cleric was born.  Gutenberg’s famous Bible was in Latin - the HTML of the day - but editions in German soon followed it.  The increased availability and reduced cost of the Bible meant the Good Word was available not just to the princes and priests but also to burghers and others of modest means. 

Free of Biblical gatekeepers in the pulpit, lay people could analyze the church’s teaching, form their own conclusions and protest - or Protestant - at will.

In the New World, professional journalism was the work of printers.  Much of the content of the early America publications came “over the transom” from people who wished to share their knowledge or influence others.

Perhaps the best known citizen journalists of the young American nation were Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay.  Their 85 essays published in newspapers in 1787 and 1788 later became a standard of civics class homework:  The Federalist Papers.  But the papers were not the work of paid writers.  Their work ran under a mysterious byline “Publius” and was dribbled out to readers piece-by-piece.  In the 21st century, we might call them bloggers.

The practice of using unpaid or token-pay correspondents continued in the United States well into the mid 20th century.  Walter Williams, eight years before founding the first school of journalism in 1908, spoke fondly in of country correspondents who “often worked for stamps, stationary and recognition among their neighbors.”

These small items (called “personals” by some editors) often seem trivial to the editor but they attract and hold the country subscriber without whom the newspaper would not exist.

Those of us who were in newsrooms during the 1970s can well remember when this practice changed during the great newsprint shortage of 1973.  When the price of newsprint skyrocketed and the paper itself was rationed by suppliers, newspaper owners took drastic measures.  Comic strips shrank to a fraction of the page width, ads were restricted and non-essential content such as those local columns was pulled.

When the newsprint market stabilized, only the ads came back.  Unfortunately, most of the midlevel editors in newsrooms today are too young to remember the popularity of “The Fred Walters of Littleport hosted a dinner party Thursday to celebrate daughter Sylvia’s high school graduation...”

Without the tempering effect of non-professional correspondents, professional news people evolved into the “priests of journalism”.  Jay Rosen described the concept in a fanciful syllabus for an “Understanding the Priesthood of the Press” course:

How does this elite group create and maintain its authority over what counts as serious journalism? What sense of duty goes along with being one of the high priests? What are the god terms and faith objects in journalism, and how are they derived?

By the late 1990s, critics were decrying the press as arrogant, elitist and unresponsive to the public.  Then along came the Internet.  The launch of the World Wide Web in 1991 was the cultural equivalent to Gutenberg firing up that first press in 1440.  As in the 13th century, the Web had little impact at first.  But once the public was given translations of the neo-Latin HTML code, all hell broke out again. The heretics now had the ability to distribute “news” in their own way.

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