Citizen Journalism

When I was at uni I took part in Citizen 1000 - a citizen journalism project set up by BBC Coventry and Warwickshire.

At the time I did it mainly becuase it looked fun, you got a bit of very basic training and it looked good for my CV. I really had no idea of the big raging debate that surrounds the concept of citizen journalism.

I've just been making a web page about user generated content on the internet, and much of the criticism inspired by UGC refers to the unreliability and poor ethical standards of a lot of citizen journalism.

Now, when I was involved, being based in the west midlands, there was rarely anything more exciting to report than a fallen tree blocking one of the routes out of leamington, or a retired woman giving tips on how to protect your roses from frost.

But if there had been, I still don't really see how there could have been a problem. For one thing, the attitude that Citizen 1000 took was that citizen journalism was a good way of keeping up to date with all the areas that BBC Coventry and Warwickshire covered. For example, I was a link to Warwick Univeristy, while a woman I met at the training lived in Kenilworth, hence being a link there. It was not viewed merely as a cheap way of getting news, but a way of inspring interaction and involvement from its audience. None of us felt exploited because we weren't paid; that wasn't why any of us got involved.

The BBC also exercised a certain degree of editiorial control over what we submitted, and what was actually broadcast or published online. Even if one of us had wanted to display poor ethical standards or unreliable news, we would have been caught out at the first hurdle.

I admit that perhaps other companies are not as rigorous in their checks as the BBC, but I do think that news companies enlisting the help of citizen journalists are generally fairly careful.

It seems that the area most people really mean when they moan on about citizen journalism is the world of blogging, video posts and YouTube. It is here that people can go unchecked and unpoliced. They are able to write whatever they want, and need to follow no ethical or moral code in order to be published.

If people want to class this as citizen journalism then I will admit the presence of a problem. But personally I would define citizen journalism as the involvement of the general public with a journalistic institution; an institution that can impose or translate a certain ethical code onto submissions.

And maybe this is where the real debate lies - not in the ethical and moral nature of citizen journalism, but in it's tecnical definition.