Crash to Paywall, page 23
User engagement is the culmination of the civic, or public, journalism movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, Mark Deuze writes. “Civic journalism as such is sometimes characterized by three steps: it reformulates the relationship between the press and the people, it emphasizes establishing connections and contacts between journalists and the communities they cover trying to address the audience as equal partners instead of ‘just’ consumers, and finally it emphasizes a focus on issues instead of institutions (summary from Dahlgren, 1998). Although this last item may not be typical of online journalism, the first two points could come straight out of a handbook of ‘how to do online journalism’” (1999, 385–6). One of the founding fathers of the movement, New York University’s Jay Rosen, says public journalism was ahead of its time, an idea in need of a technology: “Looking back from the perspective of today. I would say the civic journalism movement (1) warned that something was awry in the journalist’s connection with the public, and the Internet came along and proved it, and (2) anticipated the importance of what today is called ‘engagement’ with a more active user.”
In some cases, technology has sent us forward to the past. It was the Internet and the return to breaking news that brought reporters back to filing on tight deadlines and resurrected the inverted pyramid. Unland says that when the Edmonton Journal went to live online reporting in the 2000s, editors were surprised to find that reporters in their late forties and fifties adapted the most easily because they had learned their craft at a time when tight-deadline news writing was the norm across the board. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the demise of the multiple-edition newspaper and the imposition of earlier press runs – often to accommodate outside printing jobs – newspapers had taken to holding over a lot of material that had traditionally been written on tight deadline, such as overnight concert and theatre reviews, and late sports stories. As a consequence, a universal ability to write fast, tight, and right had more or less skipped a generation.
SMS and Twitter have brought back the rewrite desk. For example, for the hearing of confessed armoured car robber and killer Travis Baumgartner, “we had three people in the courtroom, and two were live tweeting,” Edmonton Journal managing editor Stephanie Coombs says. “They were sitting next to each other and coordinating their tweets. They were doing it so anyone who was on Twitter could get the news. But also, what we did was have a rewrite person in the office, an editor, take their tweets and write it into a story. That’s like the old days of rewrite … But this was so much faster.”
It is a short step from civic journalism to citizen journalism, and from the press involving the user to the user involving the press. A lot of modern reporting – spot and investigative – is being done by people with no professional training, who simply feel the need to bear witness. The Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 and the ensuing civil wars in Libya and Syria were, to a large extent, reported with cellphone, Twitter, and Skype. Sometimes, citizens were taking pictures with cellphones, alongside professional photographers and videographers with expensive equipment. Sometimes, only people with cellphones were there to record a tragedy or atrocity. Occasionally, the people with the cellphones have even found themselves covering the deaths of the journalists with whom they had been working.
Like rewrite, the inverted pyramid, and reader involvement, this is not a new phenomenon. Citizens have been providing images and bearing witness for journalists as long as there have been pads, pencils, and cameras, and some iconic works of photojournalism are the work of amateurs. The famous photo of a woman grieving over the body of a dead protester at Kent State University in 1970 was shot by a photography student taking a break from his work; the horrific photos of the crash of an American Airlines DC-10 that lost an engine on takeoff in 1979 were taken by a bystander at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport; the video of Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles police in 1991 was captured by someone with a home video camera on a nearby balcony. Perhaps most famous, the iconic footage of the John F. Kennedy assassination was taken on an 8mm home movie camera by Abraham Zapruder, a Dallas garment manufacturer, who happened to be filming Kennedy’s motorcade as it passed through Dealey Plaza on 22 November 1963. Thanks to technology, we are all Abraham Zapruder: the streets are filled with potential witnesses with video-equipped smart phones.
The revelation that police at the University of California at Davis pepper sprayed peaceful protesters in 2011 fits into the citizen-witness continuum. It also highlights how much easier it has become for citizens to bear witness. When campus police opened fire with their pepper-spray canisters, several onlookers captured the event with their cellphone cameras. However, rather than being sent to the media, the footage was posted on YouTube, where it contradicted the university’s version of events: that unruly protesters had forced campus police to act. Then, the media picked up on it, and eventually the university president was forced to apologize. The situation highlights the fact that “police and government … seemingly cannot get their heads around a simple enough concept that wherever one is, someone is watching and recording” (Whittaker 2011).
A near-perfect example of a combined newsgathering effort was the video footage of a gunman who shot a ceremonial guard at Ottawa’s war memorial and then rampaged through Parliament in October 2014. It was captured by security cameras, a print journalist, and passersby with smart phones. Stitched together, they provided a moment-by-moment visual account of the crimes as they were being committed.
Digital technology and the Internet have enabled people to go directly to the audience without passing through the media, and to do it with a speed the news media can’t always match. For example, there hasn’t been a US war covered by a completely independent media since Vietnam. During the Gulf War, reporters covered combat from a distance, getting their information from daily military briefings. The situation was, more or less, the same in Afghanistan, though reporters were allowed to accompany military patrols. The 2003 invasion of Iraq started out to be perhaps the most heavily mediated and controlled armed adventure in US history, with reporters going into action “embedded” with military, who were responsible for them, and to whom they were responsible. But, once the United Sates was in control of the country, it was left to bloggers inside the military to circumvent military censorship – and they were on the Internet almost immediately. The abuses at Abu Ghraib prison were reported largely because a group of US soldiers took pictures with digital cameras and then posted them online. In the same way, a few dozen military personnel with laptops went online and created an instant Iraq War literature. Wired magazine described this “oddball online Greek chorus narrating the conflict in Iraq” as including “a core group of about 100 regulars and hundreds more loosely organized activists, angry contrarians, jolly testosterone fuckups, self-appointed pundits, and would-be poets who call themselves milbloggers, as in military bloggers” (Hockenberry 2005).
It was only a matter of time before an organization sprang up to facilitate this sort of reporting of information leaks. WikiLeaks, founded in 2007, was dedicated to revealing information that the powers that be would prefer left alone. And, as with traditional journalism, its access to that information was dependent on an ability to guarantee its sources’ anonymity. During its most active years, WikiLeaks released data ranging from Sarah Palin’s email to documents revealing the inner workings of Scientology, to protocols from Guantánamo Bay.
In 2010, WikiLeaks went high tech and high profile, when it took possession of a massive, encrypted video file, and then put out a call for a supercomputer to decrypt it. What it found under the encryption was a thirty-eight-minute video of US helicopter troops firing at civilians on the ground in Baghdad, killing twelve, including two employees of the Reuters news agency. WikiLeaks posted the entire video, as well as an edited seventeen-minute version, which was more widely seen because it was on YouTube. As for the process of decrypting the video, the organization was simply doing what the news media should have been doing, said WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange: “That’s arguably what spy agencies do – high-tech investigative journalism. It’s time the media upgraded its capabilities along those lines” (Cohen and Stelter, 2010). WikiLeaks has been criticized as often as it has been praised for its approach of not asking questions about the origins of its material before publishing it. “WikiLeaks comes up only infrequently in conversations about innovative efforts to reinvigorate journalism. Though one can make the claim that WikiLeaks’ pushing of legal and ethical norms makes it marginal to such conversations, it is equally true to say that WikiLeaks is unsettling to journalists because it represents a radical shift in the way information is collected and distributed in the media landscape” (Lynch 2010, 310). That’s a slight overstatement. The massive series of leaks by US Army intelligence functionary Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning sat unnoticed for months on the Internet before publications such as the New York Times and the Guardian picked up the material, edited it, and began to publish it. It was only once it was in print that it became a cause célèbre. “Journalism had to give the material credibility, and journalists had to do the hard work of vetting the material and analyzing it to find out what it meant. That required paid, full-time journalists with institutional support” (McChesney 2013, 195).
Also, as Yochai Benkler (2011) has demonstrated in great detail, WikiLeaks is not immune to pressure from states and markets. In fact, it has become something of an affront to the Social Responsibility Theory of the press, and governments and corporations have made occasionally strenuous attempts to force it into line. For example, the Manning leaks provoked very effective attacks by government and business that left Manning in jail, Assange seeking asylum, and WikiLeaks hobbled.
Perhaps the most vivid recent examples of how citizen journalism can fill the gaps in our knowledge has come from the civil wars in Syria and Libya. Almost daily, the Western news networks have carried images of bombing, strafing, and shelling, and of shattered buildings, broken bodies, and grieving, enraged, or victorious civilians. This sort of information flow belongs almost entirely to insurgents – since official sources have official ways of disseminating information – and is, therefore, understandably biased. In the most unsettling manifestation of direct communication, the radical Muslim group isis has shown remarkable proficiency in using Internet technology to manipulate the mainstream media and build a heroic mythology about itself.
Often, the setting of a story may be so dangerous or remote that the only way to get information is to pick it off the Internet, to which it has been uploaded by citizens with cellphones and cameras, who are living the story as they report it and blending citizen journalism with advocacy reporting. For example, though some professional reporters have been covering the insurrection in Syria, they have mostly been working beside citizen journalists, sometimes to tragic and surreal effect. Take the instance of US reporter Marie Colvin and French photographer Rémi Ocklik, who were killed in the Syrian government shelling of Baba Amr in February 2012. They had been working alongside Syrian Khaled Abu Salah, a spokesman for the Revolution Leadership Council of Homs. Just a few days earlier, they had reported on him. After the shelling, he was reporting their deaths, via cellphone camera: “Within an hour, his video report would be posted on YouTube, and then picked up by networks around the world. ‘They were killed because of the random shelling of the Baba Amr neighborhood,’ Mr. Salah said, angrily shaking the forefinger of one good hand at the camera; his other hand, wounded by shrapnel, was bandaged. ‘This is a call to save the remaining residents while they are still alive’” (Nordland 2012).
Citizen journalism has proved particularly effective and valuable in times of natural disaster. When an earthquake rocked Christchurch, New Zealand, in February 2011, much of the public service communication and news reporting came via user-generated content, helping people locate loved ones, publicizing distribution points for supplies, and getting out the story of what was happening. Similarly, most of the close-up video of the catastrophic tsunami that followed the Tohoku earthquake in Japan a month later came from people on the ground, who felt compelled to record what they were trying to survive. “In a disaster UGC [user-generated content] is not here for your entertainment. It is not competing with network news for ad dollars. It does not care whether it should be pitted against professionals or win a journalism award. It is a way for people experiencing the most significant event of their lives to bear witness, to cry out their pain and their suffering and their need, to connect with people close by who are sharing their experience and to connect with people far away who, but for their voices, might mistake these events for a blockbuster movie on a soundstage” (Colbin 2011).
There are apps for that. As well as providing organizing and communication tools for civil resistance, such as the anti-globalization protests and the Arab Spring uprisings, social networks like Twitter and Facebook keep us up to date on local and world events. This kind of citizen journalism is what inspired Mark Malkoun, of Lebanon, to create an app called Completure, which bills itself as a “complete citizen and photojournalism FREE News app, from the creation of the story, to the distribution and selection.” It promises to enable anyone to “create a mini-story in seconds using photos, geo-location, and a short title about real-world events” (completure.com 2014).
More recently, German Manuel Tessloff developed a smart phone app called Apparazzi that allows people to become one-person hyper-local news sources. With the app, people can cover their neighbourhood and post pictures, video, headlines, and short news items, and alert other users with push notifications. “Unlike Facebook or Twitter, where users follow people, users of Apparazzi follow places” (Deutsche Welle 2014).
There are new dangers in the amount of information being gathered, and the speed with which it becomes part of the public discourse. For example, after the Boston Marathon bombings, a “human flesh search engine” (Sanchez 2013) fanned out across social media seeking to identify two men in a couple of grainy pictures released online. Several innocent people briefly became the world’s most reviled villains, as their pictures and names appeared on blogs, newspapers, news sites, social media, and twenty-four-hour TV news.
Citizen journalism is valuable, fast, and often exciting, but to say it is a substitute for professional journalism is going a bit far, the Poynter Institute’s Regina McCoombs told Global Post: “I don’t think they answer any questions, but they raise questions and cast doubt on things people say. It’s good to have them, but to say they prove or disprove anything is a stretch” (Lodish 2011).
Sometimes, doctoring the truth can seem innocent to the perpetrator, as with the case of a Syrian citizen journalist in Homs, who added smoke to a backdrop of a report to increase its dramatic effect (Flock 2012). And some citizen journalists see nothing wrong with breaking the law or practising entrapment to forward their agenda. For example, “conservative gotcha artist” James O’Keefe became famous for posing as a pimp to ensnare officials of the left-wing Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) by filming them advising one of his “prostitutes” to game the system. In January 2010, he was arrested for tapping the phones of Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu (Meek 2010).
While YouTube offers a worldwide arena for citizen journalism, it has barely begun to realize its potential. The Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism took a tally of the most popular YouTube videos in 2011 and, not surprisingly, music dominated seven of the months, with Lady Gaga taking two, and the other five belonging to Drake, Katy Perry, Rock in Rio, Taylor Swift, and Amy Winehouse (the Rehab video spiked after her death). Three others belonged to a video game, the death of motorcycle racer Marco Simoncelli, and a homeless man with a powerful singing voice. Only two months were dominated by news: March, with the Japanese tsunami, and May, with the death of Osama bin Laden (PEJ 2012b).
The popularity of the thirty-minute video Kony 2012, about the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, indicates that there may be an appetite for current events among young people. It was viewed an average 7.6 million times a day for the first ten days after it was posted on YouTube, and 125,00 times a day over the following four months (PEJ 2012b). Another Pew Center study showed that the Kony video revealed that younger people tend to get more news from YouTube than older people do. Those aged eighteen to twenty-nine were much more likely than older adults to have heard about Kony and his Lords Resistance Army through YouTube or social media such as Facebook and Twitter (Rainie et al. 2012). This has interesting implications for YouTube as a future news source, Amy Mitchell of Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism told the Globe and Mail. “There’s a new form of video journalism on this platform. It’s a form in which the relationship between news organizations and citizens is more dynamic and more multiverse than we’ve seen in most other platforms before” (Coyle 2012).
YouTube is only the most obvious manifestation of an evolving way of collecting, processing, and disseminating journalism that involves an ever mutating and shifting network of connections and affiliations, partially dependent on media such as Twitter and Facebook to call attention to itself. That would also imply that the most important role of traditional media might be to play moderator, facilitator, truth detector, and publicist for this organic newsgathering network. One of the major duties of journalism may be to monitor the flow of information and opinion: harvesting the best of it, and trying to assure something important doesn’t go unnoticed and that lies don’t permeate the public record. The spread of false information on the Internet is a growing concern. Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism has released a 150-page report, Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content, that explores “the onslaught of hoaxes, misinformation, and other forms of inaccurate content that flow constantly over digital platforms” (Silverman 2015, 1). The study’s author, Craig Silverman, found that, driven by the needs to react instantly to breaking news and to draw eyeballs to their sites, mainstream news organizations play an important role in retransmitting misinformation online. And it is a tall order for those news organizations to set the record straight. “Fake articles are engineered to appeal to hopes, fears, wishes, and curiosity. They are not restrained by facts or reality. This gives them a leg up in creating shareable content that drives engagement” (68).
