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Citizen Journalism

“When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.” So wrote Jay Rosen in summarizing the recent proliferation of non-professional news reports and eyewitness accounts flowing from cellphones, blogs and Twitter accounts the world over.

More of a categorization than a particular content form, a piece of citizen journalism can be anything between the more lengthy, polished pieces you might find on OhmyNews, and a cameraphone image tweeted to the Internet with nothing more than a brief caption (if that). Often times, assorted flotsam from the citizen journalist pool appears in “pro-amateur” hybrid contexts: news sites like the BBC sometimes use images taken by citizens to accompany their professional reportage, while Twitter accounts and even Facebook pages sometimes offer important details in breaking news stories. To use obvious recent examples, citizen journalism has played a key role in our understanding of historic tragedies like Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech massacre, and the July 2005 London bombings. The 2009 popularity boom of Twitter has only served to kick citJ (as it is sometimes abbreviated) into overdrive.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of citizen journalism as news is that it eliminates the role of the editor, which invariably leads to problems of credibility and verification. As Jeremy Porter blogs for Journalistics:

With traditional journalism, it was safe to assume for a long time that the information we were getting was factual. Checked and re-checked for accuracy…giving us all the news that’s fit to print, up front in the first three paragraphs. Today, anyone can write or record anything and present it as fact – leaving us to serve in the capacity of editors.

At its best, citizen journalism provides miniature, fascinating, and incomplete portraits of news-in-the-making, as with Demotix’s user-generated photodocuments of tragedies like that of the brutal counterrevolution in Iran. At its worst, it pollutes established newswires and the public attention span with rumor mill nonsense, such as the bogus 2008 report that Steve Jobs was having a heart attack. Somewhere inbetween is the sensationalist fame-seeking and dire factual inaccuracies of soldier Tearah Moore’s “insider reportage” on the Fort Hood massacre, as David Carr laments.

Regardless of its inherent pitfalls, citJ is now a vital part of the modern journalistic landscape, and it’s not about to disappear. As with anything that reaches a certain level of ubiquity (with potential to become even larger), many have been experimenting with how to wring profit from it. And the question of money as regards citizen journalism actually splits into two separate, equally important considerations: Firstly, is there a way for entrepreneurs and businesses to exploit citizen journalism? And secondly, as Steve Outing asked: “Are exposure and doing it ‘for the good of the community’ enough to motivate citizen journalists over the long term? Or will it take some form of compensation for quality citizen journalism to appear?”

The Professional Citizen Journalist

Outing posed that question way back in 2005, in an article titled “It’s Almost Time to Pay Up for Citizen Journalism.” On their conceptual surfaces, professional (paid) journalism and citizen (usually unpaid) journalism appear antithetical. But there have already been a few key attempts for citizen journalist websites to get better content by paying professionals.

Allvoices, a website that brands itself “the leading source for credible citizen reporting,” now looks to implement displaced pro journos via its “Provoices” campaign — at once a separation from the concept of the “citizen journalist,” and an acknowledgment that there is still real value in the craft of the trained correspondent. They plan to pay up to $250 upfront for content regarding key beats, with a bit of a new media twist: if the story generates a lot of traffic, the writer could become eligible for merit-based bonuses.

Amra Tareen, Allvoices’ CEO, said that with this program they aim to “[provide] a platform for the best of these journalists to continue to cover their beats, communicate with a global audience and earn money doing it.” And although it’s interesting to hear this coming from a leader in the citJ business movement, it’s hard not to hear her words as “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” — albeit one who pays a lot less.

Perhaps more interesting about Allvoices is the content it garners from its 200,000 registered citizen journalists, largely free of charge. They do have an incentive program — which expires shortly, at the end of 2009 — but the pageview rewards could hardly sustain anyone making legitimate efforts to earn them. For 10,000 views of a story, a writer earns $200; for 1 million, $5 thousand; for 10 million, $100 thousand — although this all has to occur within just 15 days of the article’s posting. Considering the all-time most-viewed article on the website currently has just over 200,000 views, it’s clear that no “professional citizen journalist” is upgrading from the one-room flat anytime soon.

As the San Francisco-based business is just beginning to implement the Provoices program, it remains to be seen whether they will find enough merit in pro-journalist content to continue paying for it when they have been harvesting a steady crop of citizen content largely for free.

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The outlook might not be good, seeing how the original citizen journalism news site OhmyNews (which has been searching for the right business model ever since its 2001 founding in South Korea) discontinued its CyberCash payment system for contributors to its international site earlier this year, due to “financial pressures caused by the current global economy” — which seems to also be the reason why they’re now asking for voluntary subscription fees to view content.

Although they have replaced the payment system in favor of a scaled-back rewards program (much like the one Allvoices has implemented since its founding), head of international business relations Jean K. Min says, “We don’t believe [our contributors’] sole reason of writing for us is to earn money.” Which, if it holds true, might suggest that citizen journalism exists more as a content schema than any kind of viable business model. After all, it would be difficult for a for-profit news organization to motivate a staff of citizen journalists to maintain a reliable stream of content without compensation.

Aggregating Citizen Journalism

Some companies have attempted to interface less directly with citizen journalists, instead aggregating the content and making money via ad revenues. Most famously, Pajamas Media attempted to create and centralize a network of blogs focused on citizen reporting and commentary, which would generate money through ads on those sites. That ceased earlier this year, as Pajamas CEO Roger L. Simon explained in a now-deleted post: “We disbanded the ad network part of our business for a simple reason: it was losing money and we couldn’t see how in the reasonable future that would change. Actually, that part of our business [had] been losing money from the beginning.” Offering a telling insight into his philosophy re: citizen journalists, he referred to his blog partners as having been “on the dole” of their quarterly Pajamas Media paychecks, leaving a wake of many disgruntled and disappointed former employees.

As such, Jim of 24thstate.com contends that “citizen journalism is a failed business model because journalism is a failed business model,” citing the failure that both have experienced in the shrinking realm of ad revenues.

The newspapers are not publishers – they are advertising networks who use the news comics, and editorials as bait for advertisers.  You cannot create a network based on news or content.  You create one based on advertisers, and then develop content of interest to an audience that will buy the products you are advertising…If you want to make money – make friends with advertisers, and give them a product that delivers value.  Approaching that from the other end just isn’t smart business.

Entrepreneurial Efforts

The long list of failed attempts (and dearth of successful ones) by entrepreneurs to capitalize on citizen journalism seems to corroborate Jim’s claim. In late 2005, Backfence secured $3 million in venture capital to become an aggregator of hyper-local, citizen-generated news stories; in late 2009, it exists only as an aggregator of local business directories. Gather unveiled itself in 2006 as “a kind of eBay for online writers and their readers,” aiming to eventually give popular online writers a way to make a living; shifting gears to social networking, it now simply promises to “make it easy to make new friends.” Scoopt outlasted its competitors for many years in trying to serve as a “citizen-news-photography” site that collected amateur-snapped shots of news events — in turn selling them to mainstream press outlets and sharing the revenues — but wound up closing its doors in early 2009 with the following statement:

Our experience with Scoopt has taught us some very valuable lessons. We remain convinced that there is a demand for this kind of material as part of an editorial product, but for the moment we are choosing to focus our energies within Getty Images on our core products in news sport and entertainment.

Another mid-decade experiment in citizen journalism, YourHub.Com, was conceived by the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Newspaper Agency to invite and collect citizen reports on whatever local happenings and topics might interest them, with plans to expand. It now exists as an unwieldy sort of citizen journalism/dating service hybrid that seems to have fallen into neglect after the Rocky ceased operations in February of 2009. Another ambitious citizen journalism network, CitizenReporter, initially hoped to debut by mid-2006, but remains little more than a splash page today.

As Cyrus Afzali comments, “we’ve seen a host of companies that generated a ton of buzz…that mostly never made it out of the startup phase.” Across the board, efforts to find profit margins in the citizen journalist model appear to be tentative at best.

Conclusion

Citizen journalism expert Amy Gahran said in 2005, “Paying citizen journalists may help, but honestly I don’t think it’s the ultimate answer. Nor do I think it’s feasible given the fact that news organizations have been generally cutting budgets and staff for years.” The past four years appear to have vindicated her prophecy — especially considering that organized citJ ventures, even at their most successful, maintain very modest profit margins.

Yet there is equal merit in Kirsten Johnson’s perspective: “Citizens cannot and should not be viewed as free labor.” This rings especially true when we consider how hard it is — with citizen journalism as with anything else — to maintain a steady flow of content without offering compensation in return. In light of Backfence’s failure, founder Mark Potts is no doubt eating crow for his nil-payment philosophy of 2005: “People like being able to show that they know something about a topic and they like to be recognized for sharing that knowledge with the community. Historically, that’s [been] motivation enough.”

So the resultant paradox may lie at the heart of why the commercialization of citizen journalism has remained elusive. Though many will continue trying to find a way, and a surprise success could follow, it would seem that citizen journalism is at best a supplementary business model. By properly implementing the most relevant and valuable pieces of citizen journalism as they already exist (rather than trying to co-opt and commission fresh citizen journalism content of their own), news sites could improve their reportage and attract more visitors (and hence, ad revenue). Citizen journalism is a fascinating evolution and blossoming of the civic journalism movement of the ’90s, and it has already exerted tremendous influence on modern life via the web — but as a business model, it may only play an auxiliary role.

Further Reading