Week 8: The Internet is not for geeks only

Here's an interesting development in citizen journalism. BBC announced plans to offer training to citizens who want to go into "citizen journalism," according to an article in the Editor's Weblog, citing at least two sources.

Apparently, BBC wants to open up its in-house training program to the public. As I was reading this, I recalled Karen Lema's blog titled, "A little journalist in us." She somehow sums up the point that citizen journalists, bloggers, or mobloggers --for bloggers who use mobile devices --need to learn a thing or two about "journalism." They have to follow certain principles in journalism--which I completely agree with. These principles involve being objective, thorough, honest, balance, and truthful. BBC's move is clearly a move towards teaching these same principles to bloggers, CJs, mobloggers and whatnot.

But what is journalism, anyway? What do they do? Some say they're storytellers. Others say they make sense of facts and information they get and hopefully re-tell them straight to readers with much honesty and integrity. That's the ideal scenario. But over the years, we've seen the quality of journalism decline despite the ideals this vocation proclaims. Journalism has been maligned by the very people who preached objectivity, truthfulness, honesty, and transparency. The public has also grown tired of the traditional media.

Now, here comes the Internet allowing anyone to be a "journalist" and the traditional media is now trying to figure out where they fit in. For sometime, traditional journalists saw the Internet a fad and hoped it would go away. But it didn't. It changed and still continues to change the face of journalism.

It's correct to believe that the Internet or technology per se are just tools, which journalists can use in their practice. However, these very same tools are now available to everyone to disseminate information While journalists proclaim they had years of training and experience, the public's collective and collaborative efforts have slowly matched what media had been offering: information. Are they doing journalism? No or perhaps not yet.

Bottomline: I would be slow to dismiss all these developments in technology and journalism as fads. While our roles as journalists will not change very much in the future, we should also understand how these things will work for us and not against us.

And to end, here's an interesting quote from colleague and Filipino journalist and blogger Joey Alarilla's column from INQUIRER.net:

We are living in an age where we can shoot videos and take photos using our mobile phones, and upload these on the Web for use with articles. This is far cheaper and speedier than the old way of having a TV reporter, camera crew, producer and editor create a short segment on television. And you can already shoot the video with the Web in mind, with an understanding of how it will complement the other elements in your multimedia story.

This is what many in Old Media still don't realize, that we have to create content for the Web, instead of just uploading shovelware.

Week 7: On-the-go journalism and web 2.0

When bombs went off in Mumbai, the first thing I did was go to Flickr (click photo to see more) and YouTube to check photos and videos taken by people who might have witnessed it. These popular social networking websites now allow people to capture history. In today’s wired world, the unfolding of events can be documented almost instantaneously with technology. But can we describe this practice journalism?

Armed with a phone camera, I have been taking snapshots of events/people while on field since last year. But due to frustrating speeds of sending photos via today’s local mobile network, I still download these photos onto a PC before sending it to my editors. Perhaps this is the first step towards mobile journalism. (Also listen to the short podcast I did).

Mobile journalism involves Internet technology and telecommunications. Both are modern tools for delivering news on-the-fly. When I started working for an online publication six years ago, the standing order was to: “write for today and not tomorrow.” Today, that has changed to: “break the story now and add photos, videos and audio quickly.” Sounds like a lot of work? Yes it does. But since the Internet is multimedia, people expect more from journalists (who do not necessarily work for the online medium) to also produce photos, videos and audio. Mainstream media is now looking at hiring younger and more tech-savvy journalists to cover news because they understand readers' behavior today.

At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a blogger observed how fellow bloggers attending this big event have become source of “scoops” and “inside information.” Not every journalist could cover this event alone. But they have provided "just in time" information for mainstream media. He called it “instant journalism.” I simply call them “leads.”

Week 6: CJ is still journalism gone hi-tech.

I recently had a brief online exchange with a colleague on how bloggers and journalist would soon become "one." He disagreed, stressing bloggers and journalists have clashing values. Journalists follow established standards, while bloggers don’t. But in countries where media is censored, blogs have only been the means to do “citizen” journalism.

Citizen journalism is an idea that can be broken down further to understand what it is. Journalism is a "profession," for some a vocation. This title has often been given to people who work for media organizations. Their role is to deliver news that hopes to help citizens make better and more informed decisions.But the act of doing journalism does not necessarily mean one has to be employed in a newspaper.

With the Internet and blogs, regular people are now empowered to do journalism. That is if they follow the ethical "standards" of thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, transparency and independence.

Dan Gillmor says it best: “Technology has given us a communications toolkit that allows anyone to become a journalist at little cost and in theory with global reach. Nothing like this has ever been remotely possible before.”

But to quote Spiderman: “With power comes great responsibility.”

I believe citizen journalism is journalism the way it was, or the way it should be. Citizens now have been given back the power not only to consume but also “pro-duce” news, as Gillmor puts it.

What blogs have done to journalism is make citizens part of the news process. Bloggers won't replace journalists. But both will be working together in the future to deliver a better version of the news. Call this the future of journalism. But I would simply call it journalism with stress on the citizens.