Citizen Journalism vs. Legacy News: The Battle for News Supremacy

[Bill Densmore]

July 8, 2010: Citizen Journalism vs. Legacy News: The Battle for News Supremacy
A team of researchers from the Missouri School of Journalism and two other schools say that even the top 60 citizen websites and bloggers are not filling the information shortfall that has resulted from cutbacks in traditional media.
http://journalism.missouri.edu/news/2010/07-08-citizen-journalism.html

[Tracy Record, WSB Editor]

I haven't found the link to the actual study in all this yet (talk about linking) but to the premise, I say bullsh*t.

Looking at what we alone do (not to mention several other NEIGHBORHOOD NEWS WEBSITES THAT PUBLISH IN BLOG FORMAT) in Seattle - We cover stories the legacy media, big and small, COULD cover but choose not to. Our city's been in a budget crisis, and one big ax target was expected to be park services. I was the only reporter at some key Parks Board meetings - NOT held in my coverage area, but they affected our readers, so I went - that neither the big nor little newspapers whose readers also were affected bothered to cover.

And I could make a list longer than I am tall. That's only one example (and I am rushing off to cover some more news so I don't have time to make the list right now). In our neighborhood, there is a huge growth issue for an industrial/commercial area that could either stay that way, or turn residential. There's been a city planning process under way. A lot of big questions have been raised. The only media org to bother with it, big or small, has been mine. Not just meetings - but a million other issues around the edges, with concerned citizens, business owners, city planners, landowners, nothing less than the future of a huge section of our area at stake.

And it's NOT that we're some special case. There are people in the new-media world busting their asses, us and many others, to cover news that legacy media couldn't have bothered themselves with when they WERE flush in big profit margins. I know. I worked in legacy media for 30-plus years. And I was guilty. No more. I know what went wrong and I know why cover what matters now, is so important.

So whatever this study boils down to, I call BS. As played, anyway, it sure sounds like another "oh whine whine whine let's save newspapers because nobody can do what they do." They botched it. Don't prop them up. Support the people who have stepped in to fill the gap. There are no grants for that, by the way, and if there were, instead of organizations like Knight and others giving hundreds of thousands to technologists (hey! we have a new way to aggregate!), maybe more of the up and comers would survive and thrive.

Off soapbox. I am sick of these studies. Spend the money on helping the promising new news organizations make it to the next level. Not on giving CPR to the already rigor-mortis'ing zombie-esque corpses of SOME (not all, there are still good ones left) legacy orgs. I am assuming that's where this goes, but if anyone has the direct link to the study, please send it to me, would love to read it. Don't have time to look further, got news to cover.

Tracy in WS, on behalf of at least 100 if not 1,000 like us

--- On Fri, 7/9/10, Bill Densmore <mediag...@journ.umass.edu> wrote:

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[Ross Williams]

Let me suggest that there are two  problems with this discussion as it is defined here:

1) Someone is making up for the traditional media's decline, because there is far more information available to me than there ever was in the past. And that information has more depth and more variety. Far from having a shortage of information, most people are overwhelmed by the amount. 

2) I don't think there really is a battle between legacy news and citizen journalism. They are both on the same side in a battle between news and information. News has always been about gathering together facts with a narrative that explains them. But I think the facts are now out there for anyone or soon will be. Which has made finding unique new raw content difficult. But there are multiple narratives about that information produced by everyone from opinionated bloggers to academics (as we see here) and in formats from written text to photos to graphics to video to sound.

Finally let me suggest that the real model for news can be seen in what has happened with major league baseball.  Traditionally both the teams and fans have relied on the media to connect them. But major league baseball now has a web site with reporters covering every team. They provide streaming of games. They provide video clips that people used to watch ESPN to see. In short, they are connecting directly with their fans. As  Twins fan, I have rarely seen a local newspaper sports writer provide any information that was not also available on the team website.

On the other hand there are wide variety of bloggers doing commentary. The team web site has statistics but there are vvariety of other web sites that provide raw statistics way beyond anything local papers ever had and in a variety of formats. And there is in-depth coverage of even the minor league players by a variety of bloggers - some of whom are fans of the minor league teams.

You will occasionally hear reporters admit that they and their sources are using one another. As long as the legacy media has an audience they will still be somewhat useful to sources. But, like baseball, the smart sources are putting their information out there and developing their own direct way to connect it to their target audience. They are increasingly less dependent on reporters and that isn't going to change because the reporters are online.

Ross Williams
Advocacy Technologies
twitter.com/rosscwilliams
www.northerncommunityinternet.org
www.grandrapidscommunityinternet.org

[Jane Stevens]

I agree, Tracy. The evidence is overwhelming that many new web-only news sites are covering more, deeper, with more context and continuity than legacy media. That's why Patch is having no trouble finding fertile ground in which to grow. 

Take a look at this growing list, notice the independents, and then scroll to the bottom to take a look at the networks of sites. The shift that's occurring is for less traditional mile-wide-inch-deep and more inch-wide-mile-deep niche news coverage. The shift began with tech, business, sports and entertainment, and is now expanding to geographic-based community sites, and environment, health, education and state government niche sites.

http://jurnos.wikispaces.com/Organizations

At The World Company (LJWorld.com, KUSports.com, lawrence.com), we've created a new social media publishing system -- Ellington Community -- that takes this to a new level. Its information architecture combines social media and journalism in a public-facing admin whose tools are open to everyone. We're jumping right over citizen journalism and into digital/social media/community journalism (help! there's gotta be a good name for this!). On the first of our niche sites to use this new system, WellCommons, after three months, our community contributes more content about local health than our reporters do, content that's as important to them as what reporters produce. (And, Tracy...it's easy to repost comments anywhere on the site...I know you were yearning for that feature at one time.)

It's too young a site and too new an approach to understand exactly how it will grow, and we still have much to add to it -- goals apps, databases, souped-up events, topic pages, better group functions, etc. -- but the local health community is over the moon about having a community resource where they can put their news, without us segregating it or labeling it, and grow their own communities around their goals. 

It's also redefining how we do journalism. The community wants a solution-oriented approach -- how can we improve the health of our community -- not just people who point out problems and walk away. We involved our community from the get-go -- a group of about 40 people joined an advisory group. They told us what they wanted, what they didn't want, and were clear, thank goodness, that our health reporter was very important to facilitating the information flow in the community, and serving as watchdog. Case in point: two people founded a new weight-loss business based on a contest to see who'd lose the most weight in a specific time. People paid to join, and whoever loses the most weight, wins money from the pool of funds (after the business owners take their cut.) Our reporter did an article about the safe and sustainable ways to lose weight, interviewed weight-loss researchers at KU, and provided information on all the weight-loss programs in the community. She plans on following the business, and we are also encouraging the business, which has a group page, to have their participants chronicle their progress.  

Cheers, Jane

Jane E. Stevens

ReJurno.com

707-495-1112 (cell)

[AmySenk]

I didn't see a link to the study, just the news article about it. And
the news article made it seem like there was an us-versus-them war
going on between legacy news outlets and independent, online
publishers like me.

In my community, three different news publications use my stories --
two in print and all three online. I know (and my readers do too) that
I'm not going to cover more than Corona del Mar, unless like Tracy
mentioned in her reply, I know a story has a local impact and no other
reporter can be bothered to cover it. And the editors at the OC
Register and Tribune-owned Daily Pilot know that they can't do a
better job covering my village, so they just use my stuff now.

A year ago, they tried swiping my articles and ignoring me. Now, we're
figuring out a new way to work together to get all our bases covered.

This study seems to promote a battle that fizzled out, at least here
in Orange County, about six months ago.

[jessdrkn]

Here's a link to the study "Citizen Journalism Sites Complement
Newspapers": http://aejmc.org/topics/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Lacy.pdf

I read the story about it and the study itself. It's not as "bad" as I
thought -- that is, it's not so much about a duel, like which is
better: cit-j or legacy. Rather the study asks whether citizen
journalism is a substitute and concludes cit-j complements legacy news
now.

Where cit-j excelled over legacy was in outside linking.

I maintain an online news start-up directory, InOtherNews.us, and I am
a media policy fellow who watches these types of new news
developments.

If you do not want to click the link, here's part of the study
conclusion, cut and pasted:

+++++++++
EXCERPT BEGINS
The data also suggest at least four observations about citizen news
and blog sites and their relationship to daily newspaper sites. First,
the citizen news sites and citizen blog sites appear to be very
different. The citizen news sites resemble daily newspaper sites more
than do blog sites, which indicates clearly that blog and news sites
are not necessarily substitutes for each other within a local
community.

Second, the primary differences between daily newspaper and citizen
news and blog sites probably reflect a difference in resources.
Timeliness requires a newsroom that interacts with the community on a
regular basis, and, as a result, news stories typically require
greater investment of time than do opinion pieces. The greater number
of technological distribution systems (iPod, RSS, etc.) on daily
newspaper sites also indicates a higher level of investment. The
overall higher level of investment at daily newspaper sites results
from having a traditional print version and from the larger newsroom
and budgets associated with being a commercial enterprise. This
difference in resources will likely perpetuate the inability of
citizen news sites to become substitutes for daily newspaper sites,
even though resources continue to decline at commercial newspapers.

Although only 27.7 percent of the sites posted an article the day
before the random visit, 71 percent of the citizen news sites and 55
percent of the citizen blog sites had posted within the past seven
days of the visit. On this attribute, citizen news sites more closely
resemble weekly newspapers—perhaps a function of lacking the resources
needed to be timely. Weekly newspapers typically require fewer
resources than do dailies. This raises the possibility that citizen
news sites might be better substitutes for weekly newspaper sites than
for daily newspaper sites.

Finally, these data suggest that, like weeklies, citizen news and blog
sites can serve as complements to daily newspapers. They can provide
opinion and hyperlocal news that large dailies do not. Dailies have
more resources, but they tend to concentrate those resources on issues
that affect larger geographic areas in their markets. The dailies are
less likely to cover details of a neighborhood than are citizen news
and blog sites, unless they actually imitate these citizen sites.
Perhaps serving as a complement better suits these citizen sites.

This study has its limits. The limited number of sites and lack of
stories in the content analysis call for an expanded analysis. Of
course, larger samples of sites would be useful, but the differences
were large enough that a larger sample would not likely affect the
conclusions. Also, a survey of news consumers would provide more
detail about the degree that citizen journalism sites serve as
substitutes and complements for traditional news organization sites.
EXCERPT ENDS
+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Jessica Durkin
Founder, InOtherNew.us
New America Foundation Media Policy Initiative fellow

[Tracy Record, WSB Editor]

thanks, Jess - WHO DID THEY READ?
in our area, at least, sites like ours publish frequently (we average 12 stories a day, I'm on my fourth one in two hours at the moment - from historic restoration to firefighters "filling the boot" to an event preview and now on to a crime story) and interact with their community a whole lot more (we are the only journalists at more than a dozen regular community meetings every month, among other things) than some of the 'legacy' types. From my further-in-the-rear-view-mirror (2 years, 7 months!) old-media career, I recall that resources tended to just mean you took longer to get the same work done. And while some may say "yes, but it's more thorough" ... not necessarily. If you ever want to learn how to work REALLY efficiently, try this for a month or three.

Tracy in WS

--- On Fri, 7/16/10, jessdrkn <jess...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Tish Grier]

The ones who quickly inferred that 'citizens' would take over the news business
were newspapers that felt threatened when some local person (often a downsized
journalist) started a "local" site.

Of all the people I've met over more than four years of hanging out with
hyperlocal "citizen" news organizers, few wanted to put the newspaper out of
business. It was more about having a discussion or presenting another angle on
the news.

and what's wrong with providing another viewpoint--esp when most local papers
are the *only* papers in their towns? What happened to having more than one
viewpoint? Why is it such a bad thing now when so many regions had more than
one newspaper for many years.

The whole "citizen journalist vs. newspapers" is nonsense. Has always been.
And, besides, if an upstart start-up puts the old dog out of business, isn't
that just good capitalism? Isn't that what democracy is about??

Tish

[AmySenk]

I wrote an earlier reply that never was posted, so I'll try again.

First of all, I can't find the study -- the link just shows an article
about the study.

Second, I find the obsession that academic types have with "citizen
journalism" to be strange. I understand the concept but I don't really
get why the study seems to ignore people like me, who are real
journalists who self-publish online.

I think the study is badly dated. The world is changing rapidly. In my
own experience, I know that a year ago, the legacy paper editors
wanted nothing to do with me other than to steal my story ideas and
laugh at me, literally. Now, those same papers run my articles in
their print editions and pay me. They know my coverage of my little
village is hard to beat, so they are working with me to serve their
readers.

The idea that it is anyone vs. anyone seems like an idea from someone
who isn't really out there, watching things change in real time.

On Jul 9, 4:44 pm, Bill Densmore <mediagira...@journ.umass.edu> wrote:

[Robin 'Roblimo' Miller]

Tracy Record, WSB Editor wrote:

> in our area, at least, sites like ours publish frequently (we average 12 stories a day, I'm on my fourth one in two hours at the moment

If you ever want to learn how to work REALLY efficiently, try this for
a month or three.

Been there, done that, had the heart attack. (NOT meant figuratively!)

You've heard the word "sustainable" applied to environmental-type stuff,
right?

Now apply it to your own life.

I've got my week's quota of work done (2:28 p.m. EDT)

:)

- Robin