Murky Waters:Debating the Role of Citizen Journalism.

0:00:05.4
Noam Chomsky
— the phrase citizen journalist, which is widely used these days uh.. refers to the fact that uh.. anybody who has a computer and uh.. access to uh.. the internet can be a journ —can uh.. post uh.. what's called journalism.


0:00:26.9
Noam Chomsky
A commentary, you know, alleged facts, maybe real facts, uh.. a critical discussion of facts, uh.. can pick things up from here and there and put them together. A lot of it's kinda valuable, but uh.. a lot of it is uh.. you know, misleading and distorted and uh.. it uh.. has its upside and its downside.

0:00:48.5
Bob Speer
It worried me that there are a lot of uh.. people uh.... citizen journalists uh.. in my column, uh.. bloggers, uhm.. who are mm.. pretending to practice journalism but are not grounded in the uhm.. the canons of the profession and uh.. don't understand the rules of the game ethically, and who do not ground their stories in sufficient uh.. enterprise and uh..

0:01:19.5
confirmation, corroboration.

0:01:23.4
Robin Sloan
It's definitely not enough to just sorta put a call out and say, "Hey, citizen journalists, what do you got?" Uh.. you have to tell people what you're expecting and what your standards are. Turns out there's a lotta people out there who are actually really excited to up their game, to kinda take it up a notch and- and act sort of like professional journalists, or semiprofessional journalists. Uhm.. you might expect that people are bored by libel law and, you know, uh.. ideas of fairness and objectivity. In fact, they're really interested in those ideas and interested in engaging with them and interested in learning about them. I think it should be a key

0:01:55.8
responsibility of all news organizations to not just report the news, but help sort of promote those ideas and help share those ideas and help everybody become a slightly better journalist.

0:02:07.9
Noam Chomsky
Uh.. the app — citizen — what's called citizen journalism, insofar as it offers opportunities for expression,for interchange,for,you know,access to new ideas and so on, that's fine. But when it's approached without any framework of understanding and interpretation, it can be extremely misleading.

0:02:29.3
Mickey Huff
So if- if uh.. if this new rise, this news journalism — and we have the term new journalism from Hunter S. Thompson and people from a coupla generations ago, but there's new journalism in a different sense, is that there can be a lotta good that comes out of people who are able to be their own reporters in their own community and tell stories that matter to their communities. You know, so on a Jeffersonian level, on a local level of information dissemination, I think that's a positive thing. I —is there still room for the one to many, instead of

0:02:55.9
many to many, in terms of an information model? I think so, yes.