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.