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In addition to that, research demonstrates that quality information tends to last longer and have more value, is cited more and turned to during times of serious events.
Is our news better, more factual, more detailed, enlightened? Or have these social media and citizen journal platforms so watered-down and demoralized writers that people are turning away?
What happens when there is an outbreak of violence in a community or a critical event folks need to have serious information?
Sometimes bloggers and citizen journalists are right there on the scene. And sometimes they make good reports with pictures and relevant ideas. Yet there are those from armchairs who propose to do the same as journalists and then from a distance with little educational foundation, or practice in journalism, to warrant a read at all. Yet write they do, therefore clogging the Internet with half truths that people read and wonder about and sometimes believe as truth.
In other words, do people turn to NBC, ABC or CBS online or on television where citizens opinions and viewpoints are integrated? Or do they turn to citizen news sites for established news? It's likely most folks will look for their hard news on established places and for extra information from citizen opinion pieces and details found in the community from those same types of informed citizens.
On the other hand, most of the public does not know when a citizen journalist has simply rewritten what is on television at the time or the local newspaper story the original writer did from first-hand sources or original research.
Furthermore, if the public turns only to social media and citizen news sites as if these are primary sources, what consequences might there be for the truth and the facts to be checked?
In asking that question over and over from Portland, Oregon to Natchitoches, Louisiana, one finds repeatedly people maintain their local paper to be valued. Even the small town paper that writes of basketball games on Saturday afternoons is treasured by a local community that wants to know how friends and neighbors feel.
On the citizen reporting level, and the traditional level, it's good to have that mix of local and world news. Citizen news sites maintain they offer that local point of view from ordinary citizens and that anyone can write news.
Are these, for the most part, citizen reports of local events or original research with new information to share?
An investigation reveals many do a good job and many do not. Many of the stories are simply recitations of today's newspapers, the ones that are touted by the creators of citizen journals as not as useful as citizen sites. These stories, rewritten from usually front pages, then go out on news bunches in big bundles over the Internet, and accent volume over value. Google web spiders and Alexa don't think before zooming in or highlighting an idea, event, or information. They simply go where they see the traffic has gone.
A rewritten story as a feature along with other sources can be developed and expanded upon, making an entirely new or substantially different story. Simply rewriting one original story does not.
In addition, "agenda writers" are often bloggers. Journalists use blogging platforms but often provide some background of themselves that differentiates them as practiced writers of a certain sort. But agenda writers are something different. These are writers of particular political views directed towards certain personalities to undermine or extol, take your pick, with little balance in theme or in purpose.
The traditional journalist is eventually undone with agendas since news writers are required to cover a broad range of topics factually. It also has at least the exposure to ethics in reporting.
The exceptions, of course, are all around us: those journalists who take liberties, yes license, with facts. On the other hand, peers know the difference, while the public might often not. That means the person who was the plumber in a town miles away from yours is able to write the news of your little spot just as well, or at least that's the way the argument states. But the feel of the crowd, the sounds and the expressions and special nuances that come from one's knowledge of things is helpful for sure with the news.
Citizen journalism was originally conceived to supplement, not replace,the traditional news media. But that is not what is happening nor celebrated by conferences where this different trend is extolled.
The message these days, and the celebration as well, is that news bites by anyone, unchecked and unleashed on Twitter, or rewritten from newspaper pages is just as good, just as valuable and likely better than the ordinary newspaper today.
Traffic is driven by volumes of people who have been told their take on the news is important. That take can be valuable for local insight at the local level where citizens are there in the moment to give information traditional journalists may not be on hand to supply.
But rewritten news information available and existing on newspaper pages at a time when many compete for the advertising dollars that keep them alive? The Las Vegas Journal's investigative group spent much time and effort citing sites for copying them, looking at some of this as plagiarism.
One wonders if the demise of newspapers would have been quite so swift and the desperation as great to do more with less, had there not been the message that anyone can, and should, write the news.
Editors, however, are available to support journalists in every venue. However, experience demonstrates that editing may not be applied in most cases, and certainly in reviewing for articles that might simply be developed from a single article rewritten and using the same key words and phrases for traffic.
It's that traffic, however, that most drives the news. The news selections come from that traffic and those who are elected to be most prominently featured are often the ones with the most social media votes.
That means your 16-year-old son can write the news about an assassin in France and be at the top of the charts while the newspaper reporter that did the original investigation in France may find fewer votes because he did not engage quite as much. That reporter was too busy getting the story in the first place.
It also means a free-for-all where "heroes" are hackers, like Julian Assange of Wikileaks, someone who has spent most of his life hacking into organizational activities in a variety of venues and whose background is in computers and technical areas as opposed to communication and news.
Then there is Edward Snowden whose hacking into his company's security materials raised questions about his technique for finding "the government is spying on us." Everyone had an opinion, but how many asked if Snowden had the journalist's eye to decide whether or not the information was of the nature that should be printed and when. It's true he had his contacts in the news world, but how many newspapers in the U.S. would consider it in the same way after he had taken the information and traveled with it to China. Was the reason only to stay in line with some government directive? Or was there some journalist ethnics book that offered enough questions to make newspapers make their own choices within what those are.
Blogging behavior that allows a writer from Pakistan to write material online, mostly embedded in canned advertising formats, and information gleaned from local city sites, that are called Bohunk News, with Bohunk the town down the road. But the Pakistan writer has never seen the town nor known any of its people and does the job for some owner somewhere in the Internet jungle who wants readership for the money and for the advertising dollars generated on the site. It helps kill the local papers even as the proliferation of bloggers are killing mainstream news, at least in its printed form.
Some platforms like Newstrust are striving to improve writer's knowledge, skills and abilities by offering training in combination with Poynter organization, a training program that allows journalists to keep up with trends, ideas and the
reporting rules.
So while social media platforms celebrate what they consider a victory of sorts, and traditional media drowns in the din of condemnation on the one hand and competition by many untrained folk without information on ethics, who loses in the long run? Who loses when news is written by the popular as much or more than the informed?
Likely the public that depends on the information as sound,fact-checked, detailed and supported in order to make knowledgeable decisions in a democracy. It may be the reason fewer and fewer people report not trusting the media, an attitude that is growing as rapidly as the ever-expanding citizen journalist folk.
Partnership, not rivalry with newspapers might be the direction that the news will eventually find as the one the public most wants and is served by better than your 16-year-old neighbor or Joe the Plumber without careful supervision and popularity developed through Internet friends. The partnership that just might work is that companionship used by the Huffington Post, where special bloggers, who have expertise in a certain area, pair with trained journalists to create a platform many people trust.
