AJC: Citizen Journalism Too Risky

Citizen Journalism is a term being used to describe the online proliferation of bloggers and other sources of news that bypasses the standard media outlets. The growth over the years has reached a point where those same media sources are starting to feel threatened as more and more the news is reported first by the "citizen journalist" before taken up by the major media outlets.

Often times this is mostly noticed in the realms of politics and star watching but more and more its spreading to all forms of news. The result is the media outlets must grudging use bloggers as a source of news. They don't like it, but they do it. Its rarely a week goes by where I read a story on the front page of CNN or Fox News that I had read on a blogger a few days before.

David Hazinski, a professor at the University of Georgia and former NBC correspondent, has decided that this represents a danger to media in the form of inaccuracies and deceptions, in article he wrote for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The citizen journalist is not really a journalist as they lack the "education, skill and standards are really what make people into trusted professionals. Information without journalistic standards is called gossip." He feels to prevent this, media organizations must create standards involving citizen sources, clarify and reinforce their own standards, and universities must "certify" citizen journalists "much as volunteer teachers, paramedics and sheriff's auxiliaries are trained and certified."

Obviously I disagree with these notions. The idea that delivery of news requires special training seems ludicrous to me. News is news, regardless of source. We have all seen what "real" journalists with "education, skill and standards" leads to: all day reports about Michael Jackson going to court, D-list actress overdosing, and little or no reporting on complicated issues such as the Iraq War or what the previous records (versus words) of candidates for President may have on our future.

If it can't be summed up in a sound byte, it must not be news. At least that seems to be the current standard. The rise of the citizen journalist resulted in a vacuum created when the traditional sources of news and information abdicated their authority when they decided the the sensational (infotainment) was more important.

Bloggers and the like can be a source of inaccurate information but one hopes that when "professional" journalists pick up the information, they don't just regurgitate but follow the same standards they have already developed for any source. That ultimately is what citizen journalism is - another tip, another source of news that needs the same confirmation of accuracy that would be necessary if it came in via a phone call or email rather then a blog. New standards are not needed, just the same standards applied to new sources.

I think Professor David Hazinski could better use his time not teaching his students to fear the citizen journalist but instead embrace them as new sources of information and news that can help them, not hinder them, in doing their job of spreading truth, on conducting investigations, and on restoring faith in a journalistic system that few believes in any longer.