First-Hand Citizen Reporting from the Presidential Race
For those of our readers following the US Presidential campaign and wanting to look beyond mainstream coverage, Henry Jenkins has a nice overview of a few citizen journalism projects which aim to provide alternative perspectives on the election race.
It’s nice to see the emphasis on first-hand reporting here (which was also a key aspect of our Australian citizen journalism projects, of course) - this works against the perception that citizen journalism is mainly the domain of “armchair journalists” (as Dennis Shanahan would have it), or simply acts as a parasite feeding on mainstream journalism content (as Jürgen Habermas appears to believe).
Also interesting is the cautious support from mainstream media organisations for such projects (in the cases Henry lists, this includes MTV and the Christian Science Monitor, for example). Next week, I’m presenting a paper at the CCi conference in Brisbane on ways for journalism to move beyond the pro-am (industry/citizen) schism, so these examples are very timely.
They indicate that citizen journalism can add significant breadth (b), depth (d), and length (of time - t) to the coverage of news (as per the quick’n'dirty diagram below). At the same time, I don’t mean to say that citizen journalism is simply an extension of or add-on to industrial journalism only; in fact, I’d argue that pro-am projects will work best if ‘pro’ and ‘am’ contributions are thoroughly integrated into the whole.
I’ll be posting more from the conference - which has a strong citizen journalism stream - as it happens. In the meantime, I’d be interested in any further examples of pro-am collaboration in news coverage that any of you might have come across (beyond the obvious ones).
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