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.
Card:Murky Waters:Debating the Role of Citizen 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.
#### Murky Waters Debating the Role of
Citizen Journalism ####