Through the Opening Door: My Pioneering Journey in Mainstream Journalism

Another one bit the dust. I went to Massachusetts as Atex became a name to conjure with and saw computer keyboards begin to replace typewriters except at the Guardian , where the National Graphical Association insisted on having their stalwarts retrained on qwerty boards so that their rights to double key-stroking remained briefly inviolate.

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Then I watched silently as, at last, the final remnants of hot metal were carried coffin fashion across the composing room floor, a way of life beaten out in traditional manner. I was there as journalists could at last set the paper themselves and lay it out on screen. And all of this, one crisis after another, one false dawn after another, seemed to promise some publishing nirvana just around the corner.

An era where the ancestral cry of the overseer as chapel meetings dragged on would be no more. No hot metal for 30 minutes. A world where communication — from editor to reader — was instantaneous rather than lugubrious. A world where editions flowed seamlessly, where pages could be changed in a trice: You could feel that print nirvana coming in the late s and through the s. New papers, new supplements, new thicker editions, the transforming wonders of colour — and the cost of the print union legions fading away as they left to find a new life for themselves.

Wapping had delivered a moment of history as well as much bitterness. But, of course, progress has a way of tripping over its own shoelaces, so the full magic of profit and reduced costs never quite happened. More of everything on many more pages meant more competition, which meant more marketing budgets. And then there was the beginning of the internet, a true new frontier. Small offices, and then much bigger offices, were needed to house a growing digital staff.

Some newspapers — the Telegraph , the Guardian — thought they saw the point fast and developed theories of parallel, integrated production. Some — even the Daily Mail — watched and waited. Few quite predicted what would happen next. Soon, ominously, the answer was clearly both: Could the staff who served online and print be truly integrated so that one team covered both?

The Telegraph produced its giant wheel of a newsroom, one function lapping into another. Other papers invented even more complex copy and picture flows. Staffing increased inexorably in any case. Technical reinforcements were essential at every stage. More programs needed more programmers. Obviously, it seemed, the basic answer would have to be different: The central competition, therefore, had to be scrabbling for advertising riches to match the exponential growth figures as smartphones left tablets and laptops in the shade. Enter Netflix, Amazon and a host of streaming options.

Enter a fresh array of web-only contenders fuelled with start-up investment. And, suddenly, there was no salvation in subscription formulas. The demand now is for more free — but more free in any every sense as ad-blocking cuts revenues sharply and digital advertising to news-oriented sites stalls, leaving all those extra staff and all those investment hopes looking a trifle bereft. More, this is a general phenomenon on the new side of the fence. BuzzFeed and other wunderkinds have to pause and ponder their profit forecasts. The Huffington Post runs out of Huff and puff.

The Gawker has pulled the chain on its own legend. Only Facebook, Google and Snapchat stand tall for the moment, hoovering up ad money and leaving precious little for the rest. So those 60 years of personal history begin to weigh heavy again.

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Think Concorde, the new, supersonic manifestation of travel. Think manned space adventure. For example, you might write about a city council meeting on your blog or in an online forum. Or you could fact-check a newspaper article from the mainstream media and point out factual errors or bias on your blog. Or you might snap a digital photo of a newsworthy event happening in your town and post it online.

Or you might videotape a similar event and post it on a site such as YouTube. Because of the wide dispersion of so many excellent tools for capturing live events — from tiny digital cameras to videophones — the average citizen can now make news and distribute it globally, an act that was once the province of established journalists and media companies. There is some controversy over the term citizen journalism , because many professional journalists believe that only a trained journalist can understand the rigors and ethics involved in reporting the news. And conversely, there are many trained journalists who practice what might be considered citizen journalism by writing their own blogs or commentary online outside of the traditional journalism hierarchy.

See more on this in the Terminology section below. One of the main concepts behind citizen journalism is that mainstream media reporters and producers are not the exclusive center of knowledge on a subject — the audience knows more collectively than the reporter alone. Now, many of these Big Media outlets are trying to harness the knowledge of their audience either through comments at the end of stories they post online or by creating citizen journalist databases of contributors or sources for stories.

Further advances such as the postal system — and its discount rates for newspapers — along with the telegraph and telephone helped people distribute news more widely.

In the modern era, video footage of the assassination of President John F. Plus, the rise of talk radio and even the D. In newspapers, there were letters to the editor and op-ed pieces submitted by citizens, while pirate radio stations hit the airwaves without the permission of the FCC. Chris Anderson, a doctoral student at Columbia University, wrote a useful timeline for citizen journalism that includes the advent of personal websites as well as the launch of the Indymedia site in after the WTO protests in Seattle that year.

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At Indymedia, anyone can share photos, text and video with other activists and the world. At that time in , the earliest weblogs were more focused on reacting to the news and were written and read by a tech-savvy audience. Other important milestones in the recent history of citizen journalism include eyewitness bloggers in Iraq such as Salam Pax giving stunningly detailed early accounts of the war.

Plus, at the U.

Change never stops, but we will always need journalism | Media | The Guardian

Later, in , the earliest photos on the scene of the London bombings on July 7 were taken by ordinary citizens with their cameraphones. Mainstream media sites run by the BBC and MSNBC accepted photos, video and text reports — a practice that continues to this day among many major broadcasters. Citizen journalists and bloggers also helped in the worldwide reaction and relief efforts to the tsunami and flooding in Southeast Asia in late and to damage wrought by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the U.

Big-time entrepreneur billionaire Mark Cuban ran his own blog to share his viewpoints directly to the public, and celebrities helped put the group blog Huffington Post on the map — leading to a similar effort in the UK by the Guardian, Comment Is Free. The terms citizen journalism and citizen journalist are not popular among traditional journalists or even the people who are doing citizen journalism at the ground level because they are imprecise definitions. It can be a rant, a rave, a rhyme, a short comment, a novel — anything you feel like writing.

Other media thinkers have suggested alternate terms for citizen journalism. But I do agree with your overall beat: When a traditional media outlet covers a story, the editor usually assigns the story to a reporter, the reporter does the work and turns in a story that gets edited and published. As more people uncover facts and work together, the story can snowball without a guiding editor and produce interesting results — leading to the mainstream media finally covering it and giving it wider exposure.

Senate in December after blogs keep up pressure over a racist remark he made. This became known as Rathergate. Later, the Washington Post wrote about it. In fact, one of the pioneering efforts in citizen journalism was the OhMyNews site in South Korea, launched in early , which has become a popular mainstream news source in that Asian country. The site is a hybrid of professionally reported and citizen reported stories, with citizen journalists being paid small sums for the more popular work they do.

Mainstream newspaper publishers have created some of the more viable citizen media sites, from the Northwest Voice in Bakersfield, Calif. Plus, Minnesota Public Radio has built a database of citizen contributors to help give reporters a more informed view of society with a project called Public Insight Journalism. Though many old-school journalists have been wary about the power wielded by citizen journalists, some of the more enlightened members of the journalism elite are starting to catch on. Kenneth Neil Cukier, a technology correspondent for The Economist in London, told the OpenBusiness blog these eye-opening thoughts on citizen journalists:.

The Internet has disintermediated middlemen in other industries, why should journalism be immune? That gives everyone the ability to have a direct rapport with the news as either a consumer or a producer, instantaneously. This is like the advent of literacy: But it empowered individuals and led to a far better world. The new literacy from digital media will do the same, even as it creates new problems. Ultimately, I believe it is a positive thing for journalism, because it enables something journalism has lacked: Citizen journalism definition at Wikipedia.

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Tools for Citizen Journalists. As with all citizen media projects, this Guide will continue to be updated with your helpful input. Second, this is a first for me: I suppose this would happen more often if more search engines were equipped to mine blog comments. Journalism or reporting is about who, what, where, when, why, and how.

It does not take a special education to be a journalist. Training, yes, education, no. The hardest part is getting the story down in simple, declaritive sentences. Reporting is nothing but getting facts and writing simple sentences. You really do not have to go to a J school for that. Anyone with a decent high school education could and should be a reporter.

Add some photography skills to the mix and one can be a jack of all trades in the journalism field. There is too much of a mystique built around reporting and so called professional journalism.

African journalism is being stifled by a lack of resources

It is simply answering the questions of who, what, where, why, when, and how, and putting it down in simple sentences and paragraphs. You mention pirate radio stations. As an economics professor, he has expertise that no reporter is expected to have. A subject matter expert can report the thing that got said and add-value by pointing out where the statement varies from evidence. Thus the time is ending that a J-school degree qualifies one for top-tier reporting jobs. Educated scepticism is what 21st century journalism should work towards. TrueGritz is now credentialled to cover the GA State Fair, surely the social media equivalent of nailing paper to doors.

I think the biggest problem journalists will have in the future is getting people to realise that their writing is worth more than the average blog writer. As a previous poster says, journalists are not really experts in anything. I read MediaShift most weeks and love what you do. Thank you for this piece about citizen journalism CJ. Do please do remember that CJ is an international phenomenon. CJ is happening in a host of countries … which would make an excellent article, BTW.

In Lakewood, Ohio we have created a hybrid citizen journalism project. We have created what we call the Lakewood Observer. What I believe makes us slightly different is we also produce, 17, page newspapers, which is distributed for FREE throught the community. As the city only has 20, front doors the coverage is pretty good, and compliments the website nicely.

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Based on our success we have made our advisory board, staff notes, and software available to other cities that would like to create a similar project. What makes this unique is that using our software a group as small as three could duplicate the project for a city. Our next projects will be cities of 7, mostly at the poverty level, 9, mostly upper middle class, and one city with 1,, Our software also generates income, which we turn into civic projects, concerts, parties and learning events. Just to add to this clear article another website innovating in the field of citizen journalism in… Europe!

It relies on a network of voluntary contributors authors and translators all around Europe. In Paris, a team of 9 full time journalists from each language edit all the articles received to make them fit with high journalistic standards. The website is here: My name is Christopher A.

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