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Handmade digital strategy from the heartland.

Reports of Citizen Journalism’s demise are, I hope, premature as well

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The knock against Citizen Journalism all along has been this:

  1. It’s created by untrained professionals amateurs
  2. It has no inherent credibility, until proven
  3. It is not edited

We just had a whopper to, unfortunately, add credence to all three, with CNN’s iReport site carrying a report that Steve Jobs had been hospitalized after a massive heart attack. Apple’s stock took a brief dive once the report was posted.

But I’m going to be a contrarian here and say the greater blame goes to CNN.

If you are CNN, the most widely-known news brand in the world, and you create a system that allows anyone to post anything as news, you must anticipate that eventually, you’ll get pranks. And worse.

Given that certainty, to not monitor such reports is nothing but a dereliction of journalistic duty.

There is much that Citizen Journalism can do to help to further the cause of all journalism, but CNN’s “set it and forget it” approach will only serve to harm the cause.

It will be interesting to see how CNN reacts to this.

(Edited to fix a bit of sloppy writing in the ordered-list above. Thanks @ShawnKing on Twitter for pointing out what happens when unedited copy is rushed to publcation!)

:-/

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Comments

  1. I was just about to write something very similar on my own blog!

    I was actually just checking the Terms and Conditions of posting on CNN, bearing in mind the two legal options seem to be to moderate everything, or go for plausible deniability and never look at anything until someone brings it to your attention.

    This isn't a failure of 'citizen journalism'. There are thousands of individuals posting on hundreds of sites in a variety of ways, both good and bad.

    It's a failure of anyone who reposted or reprinted the story without attempting to check the facts first, and the failure of one company to implement any type of controls on the content their users post – and then to be slow to monitor/respond.

    Plenty of dead tree publications have ended up in court for mistakes and fiction. And yet they're still clinging to what's left of the market.

    At the end of the day it doesn't really matter what anyone says about blogging and citizen journalism – what will matter is where audiences and advertising ends up.

  2. In defence of CNN, Dan's post raises the crucial point:

    the two legal options seem to be to moderate everything, or go for plausible deniability and never look at anything until someone brings it to your attention.

    For a news organisation to avoid ending up in court over comments on its stories or citizen journalism sites, these ARE the only legal options. There's no half and half.

    Moderating is time consuming in the extreme (even on a small regional paper that's a full time job) and also requires 24 hour staffing (or disabling the facility overnight).

    The men in charge are often very touchy about letting people post what they want, when they want. Some places I've worked don't allow comments on 50 per cent of their stories because of concern about what people will say.

    we have two choices: Trust the citizen journalist to act responsibly (and therefore choose not to police them unless made aware of a problem) – and quite often other posters will correct the offending item for you.

    Or: moderate everything. Will the money men pay for that? And doesn't it go against the whole idea of iReport?

    CNN makes it very clear. ireport is unedited and unfiltered. It's their tagline. Making it their responsibilty to check everything posted is more likely to make them wash their hands of the whole project..

    Surely the blame lies with the people who repeated it without checking?

  3. But I think this gets to my original point. “Safe Harbor” and other legal rulings around commenting and citizen journalism are often used by organizations as a convenient excuse for not doing what's right when it comes to the editing layer.

    And you're right. It costs money. But my argument is that if you're going to try to build a business on top of user-created content, then there are costs involved. Users and citizen journalists aren't just magic money-making content-creation machines. Unfortunately, this is lost on a lot of the bosses, whose only contribution to the conversation is to say “add a zero” to the revenue line and think they've spoken a great and wise thing.

    That said, at my mid-market major metro, we managed to find a way to distribute light moderation among all staff. Text was post-moderated (that is, moderated after flagged by other users), and all video and photos were queued and not made live until approved by a producer. A site with the profile of iReport should have an even more active moderation queue, imo.

  5. This is purely on the shoulders of CNN. iReport is an open system of their creation. They “trusted” the feed from iReport and published the bogus story on one of the most trafficked websites on the net.

    Feeds are a great thing. Trusted feeds are even better. But if you're displaying a feed from a non-trusted source on your popular website without filtering, you are setting yourself up for trouble. The fact that it came from a CNN property makes it much worse.

  6. This is purely on the shoulders of CNN. iReport is an open system of their creation. They “trusted” the feed from iReport and published the bogus story on one of the most trafficked websites on the net.

    Feeds are a great thing. Trusted feeds are even better. But if you're displaying a feed from a non-trusted source on your popular website without filtering, you are setting yourself up for trouble. The fact that it came from a CNN property makes it much worse.

  7. This is purely on the shoulders of CNN. iReport is an open system of their creation. They “trusted” the feed from iReport and published the bogus story on one of the most trafficked websites on the net.

    Feeds are a great thing. Trusted feeds are even better. But if you're displaying a feed from a non-trusted source on your popular website without filtering, you are setting yourself up for trouble. The fact that it came from a CNN property makes it much worse.