Alternative Voices

The combination of the online news surge and traditional newsroom cutbacks has led to a phenomenon known as citizen journalism, or citizen media, or community journalism (in those projects where the participants might not be citizens). As a grassroots movement, citizen journalism refers to people—activist amateurs and concerned citizens, not professional journalists—who use the Internet and blogs to disseminate news and information. In fact, with steep declines in newsroom staffs, many professional news media organizations—like CNN’s iReport and many regional newspapers—are increasingly trying to corral citizen journalists as an inexpensive way to make up for journalists lost to newsroom “downsizing.”

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MEDIA MOBILIZING PROJECT (mediamobilizing.org) is a community-based organization in Philadelphia that helps nonprofit and grassroots organizations create and distribute news pieces about their causes and stories. Such organizations are key to getting out messages that matter deeply to communities but that the mainstream media often ignore, such as documentation about wealth disparity at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and 2012.
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Back in 2008, one study reported that more than one thousand community-based Web sites were in operation, posting citizen stories about local government, police, and city development.56 By 2012–13, as many as fifteen hundred such sites were running. Some sites simply aggregate video footage from YouTube, mostly from natural disasters and crises such as the Boston Marathon terrorist bombing in 2013. These disaster and crisis videos represent by far the biggest contribution to news by amateurs. According to the Pew Research Center, more than 40 percent of the “most watched news videos” over a fifteen-month period in 2011 and 2012 “came directly from citizens.”57 Another Pew study identified 170 specific nonprofit news organizations “with minimal staffs and modest budgets” that “range from the nationally known [like the investigative site ProPublica.org] to the hyperlocal” that are trying to compensate for the loss of close to 20,000 commercial newsroom jobs over the last decade.58

Some critics of citizen journalism, with its emphasis on spectacular and dramatic video, hope that the amateur movement can expand beyond crisis and natural disaster footage that the commercial media pay handsomely for to “develop engaging strategies to inspire citizen reporting for other events of local or national importance … providing nuance, context and perhaps even overlooked voices.”59 While many of these sites and ordinary citizen reporters do not have the resources to provide the kind of regional news coverage that local newspapers once provided, there is still a lot of hope for community journalism moving forward. These sites provide an outlet for people to voice their stories and opinions, and new sites are emerging daily.