About a year ago, with the success of OhMyNews in South Korea; the sudden birth and just-as-sudden plateau of highly anticipated Backfence and Bayosphere; and the jaw-dropping accomplishments and ensuing controversy of Wikipedia; the term “citizen journalism” began to clog the blogosphere. (Steve Outing at Poynter, Jay Rosen at PressThink, and Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine have all carefully documented the movement.) While sites such as NewWest, Baristanet, and iBrattleboro have some good traction, citizen journalism is still a concept under development.

We’ve known for a while that the Internet is a place where anyone can broadcast anything – quickly, easily, and practically for free. The buzz in 2006, however, focused on an altogether different discovery – that ordinary people have the power (although not necessarily the skill) to mimic traditional journalism.

We saw it during Katrina, when the use of the Internet to disseminate amateur photography and collaboratively locate missing people and accumulate stories prompted the Pulitzer Committee to consider, for the first time, opening all its categories to online entries. Ultimately, it did.

We saw it again during the London bombings in July of 2005, when some of the most poignant photos came in the form of grainy cell phone images snapped hastily by passers-by.

Suddenly New Yorker journalist A. J. Liebling’s famous quote, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” fell moot on the floor.

That doesn’t mean, however, that everyone is terribly excited about the possibilities. Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia’s prestigious graduate journalism program, wrote in the New Yorker‘s August 7 2006 issue:

Citizen journalists bear a heavy theoretical load. They ought to be fanning out like a great army, covering not just what professional journalists cover, as well or better, but also much that they ignore. Great citizen journalism is like the imagined Northwest Passage—it has to exist in order to prove that citizens can learn about public life without the mediation of professionals. But when one reads it, after having been exposed to the buildup, it is nearly impossible not to think, This is what all the fuss is about?

In late August I asked four household names in Portland’s publishing realm – Mark Zusman, editor of Willamette Week; Michael Walden, former public editor of the Oregonian; Ted Katauskas, editor of Portland Monthly; and Colin Fogarty, correspondent for Oregon Public Broadcasting – how citizen journalism will affect their own work. Listen to their responses above.

Throughout the past year, I’ve developed a hunch that debating the future of journalism by pitting two camps, “traditional” and “citizen, against each other merely ignores what may in fact be a problem with both: lack of intimacy.

Traditionally, journalists are supposed to report the facts. They are to be objective and even unemotional, paying equal homage to both sides of every story.

Yet over the years, some of the most touted works of journalism – Gay Talese’s profile of Frank Sinatra in “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”; Joan Didion’s account of Haight Ashbury in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”; Ernie Pyle’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of World War II – are narrated in the first person. This does not require that the reporter write about himself; rather, the reporter is allowed to be intimate with the story and, in the process, reveal bias, emotion, and other signs of human behavior that tend to serve as a powerful boost to the narrative.

Caroline Little, who overseas the Washington Post website, recently acknowledged the power of multimedia when she sent 50 small video cameras to correspondents around the world, according to a recent Jeff Jarvis post. For a hard news story, the kind that is seldom touched with first-person injections, video may help remove the storyteller filter altogether: “The essence of multiplatform video is that we show rather than tell,” she says, “allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions about the value of the story to their lives.”

When it comes to our own experiences - sometimes strictly personal, other times professional - writing in the first person gives readers the most honest look at a story. It is one of the tricks you will find when reading compilations of award-winning narrative journalism.

The trouble, of course, is skill – namely, who among us can narrate our stories with any level of intrigue? This is not a given for citizen journalists, but neither is it a given for seasoned professionals; not everyone has a Didion or Talese hibernating within. But everyone does have a story.

As Lemann concedes above, the burden to uncover these stories falls squarely on our own shoulders; it is where citizen-created content makes the most sense. Each of us now has the ability – through a blog post, a home video, an audio clip – to disseminate our best stories to the worldwide web.

And some of them, it turns out, are not only worth telling, but even well told.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 | Email This Post

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