Citizen Journalism: Introduction

It’s difficult to imagine two words that have raised more anxiety among news media professionals than “citizen journalism.”

Citizen.  Journalism.  Simple words but a complex concept variously seen as either the end of the literate media world or the salvation of disconnected civilization.  This paper will illustrate that it is neither—and yet it is both.

I have been a curious but often skeptical participant researcher in citizen journalism since 2004.  I am in fact a traditionally trained journalist for whom the only “C” before my “J” was “community.” I spent two decades in the media of small and mid-sized cities where local news was the news. I am by nature an early adopter of technology, but I first saw blogs as mindless blather and most “contributed” stories as an editor’s nightmare.

Our tradition at the University of Missouri is to shoulder the challenges of the news media, test them as realistically as possible and then offer a roadmap to the future.  When in the first few years of the new century a few Web sites began challenging the traditional media paradigm by letting readers become writers, I was given the job of integrating this new concept into our news organization.

We launched MyMissourian.com on Oct. 1, 2004.  Aimed at the community around the University of Missouri rather than the school itself, MyMissourian features content written by non-journalists but lightly edited by the staff of senior-level student journalists. We then insert a selection of the content in the free-circulation Saturday print edition of the Columbia Missourian. Like all of the journalism school’s products, both the online MyMissourian site and the weekly print edition are aimed at the surrounding community rather than the university’s students.  Both also carry advertising.

Four years later, I’m very comfortable with both the citizen journalism concept and the phrase itself, but I’m still frustrated that my colleagues have such difficulty with it.

Citizen journalism is no more a replacement for professional journalism than teabags are a replacement for water.  Both can stand comfortably alone, but when combined they produce something quite wonderful.

The “citizen” in the term is a continual irritant to news people, who complain that it implies professional journalists are excluded from citizenship.  That is the wrong definition of “citizen.” The better analogy is “citizen soldiers”—the militia and National Guard that serve our country “part time.” As my chief warrant officer father often explained, Guard members want to help shoulder the responsibility of defending the nation - they just don’t want make careers of it.

Similarly, citizen journalists don’t want newsroom jobs - they just have something to say.  And often they want to say it because those of us on the professional side are too busy with the big stories to see the little items that mean so much to people.

The history of what we now call citizen journalism is enlightening and should be comforting to the modern scribe.  The theory that grounds it is both solid and humanistic.  And the future is a bright new journalism that not only ensures the jobs of trained-and-paid journalists, but expands their roles.

NEXT: Citizen Journalism: Humble Beginnings