Where is Citizen Journalism Taking Us?

I find myself falling into that elitist group of people who believe it’s necessary to get a degree to write a news story. It’s mainly because I want to keep reporting and get paid for it. If “citizens” take over journalism, my degree is worthless. And, I’d like to think that the quality/content of what I produce is somewhat better than someone with no training who goes out to cover a story.

I have hope for journalism, but it’s not with citizen journalism. I want in-depth investigations. I don’t just want breaking news, I want the gritty details of our criminal justice system, schools, businesses, and religious institutions.

A recent article in The New York Times told the story of a reporter from Chicago who unearthed and followed the details of a Chicago Police Department Lieutenant who tortured and eventually coerced faulty confessions from suspects. But the article wasn’t published in his former publication, The Chicago Reader, but public radio blog WBEZ Chicago. The Times article leans toward shaming the industry for not having the work published at a larger newspaper. I have to agree; the larger newspapers still have the largest readership and most links. The importance of readership is at the core of journalism: to uncover and hold accountable institutions. At least, that’s what I was taught in my introduction to journalism class in college. People can do what they want with the information, but stories like the one he uncovered help influence regiment changes, public policy, and social & political movements. It is equally important to have people reading the stories so that these changes can occur.

A recent survey by the Newspaper Research Journal supports my feelings toward the lack of good investigative reporting in citizen journalism websites. They surveyed 45 cities of various sizes and within those markets, they identified over 363 online journalism sites, which spanned the range from ad-free blogs to what they call "legacy" sites, those run by traditional news outlets. In addition, they scanned the academic literature on modern journalism, and identified 60 sites that were well regarded as providing good or innovative approaches to covering local issues.

Summing up, the authors paint a fairly grim picture of the state of local news. "Despite hopes for a thriving genre of citizen journalism as at least a partial replacement for legacy journalism, those hopes have not been realized," they conclude. "In content and coverage, CitJ [citizen journalism] lags behind legacy web sites on a variety of dimensions considered indicative of news quality."

I’ve yet to see a big investigative story on a citizen journalism website, but more breaking news tidbits or smaller posts on local news. I would like to see more investigative and enterprise stories, but this can only happen if more resources are invested in it by the growing legacy sites as well as the citizen journalism sites. Investigative reporting takes more time, effort, and resources that need to be invested in.

Lisa Gillespie is a former staff writer for Campus Progress as well as the Managing Editor & New Media Director at Street Sense. She graduated from the University of North Carolina–Asheville.