I promised I'd leave you alone, but "Josh White"? Jesus.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Apparently, you can't really paste HTML.

Josh White = Josh Marshall. Freud says there are no accidents. Wonder what it means?

Cleaner version here.

http://billyglad.blogspot.com/2008/06/citizen-journalism.html

An interesting idea. I wonder what the consequences would be. One of the problems, as I see it, with the mainstream media as is is that it's become based almost entirely on opinion.

Average TV shot for any primetime news show: split screen to 4 people billed as various "experts" or "analysts" who essentially offer their opinions. It seems that fact is losing it's place within the media. If it was ever there. (Not in my news-following lifetime.) So many people repeating the same opinions over and over again until it becomes gospel. It's own form of truth. So many examples of that in the past few months within the campaigns. Very little investigative reporting. I hear Dan Rather's HD show is decent, unfortunately not a channel I receive. 60 minutes seems on its way out.

So, would citizen journalism counter-effect this problem or add to it? Would they be required to disclose bias? Is it more opinion? Will the pieces be upheld to stringent standards?

You note the ability to mislead and misinform. Would further advances in this make that worse? Better? Perhaps it would force paid journalists to do their own jobs better? Or do we risk creating truths out of repetition. Kind of like truth taking on the form of mass opinion. Or, are we already there?

Great topic. I'm wondering if you've spent much time checking out Al Gore's Current. It's a pretty interesting model in that it's on cable as well as the web, but the content is supplied by the audience (or at least a creative class within the audience) which is in line with the Web 2.0 model. It will certainly be interesting to see whether this model and the underlying technology are truly able to return power into the hands of those who seek to provide and consume real information instead of advertising.

I dunno. Billy.

Seems like citjour is destined to become "truthy" like Wiki. Although, when I think about the history of newspapers, I suppose it did start out that way, lots of competing opinions. Not to mention lots of snark and insults, actually. Any idiot with a printing press could hold forth, and did.

"Citizen" is a word that carries a lot of responsibility, but I don't think that most people think of it that way. They think of it more as an entitlement.

Citjour is a cool word, but it makes me feel like making some soup.

I find the concept of “citizen journalists” to be rather interesting, having been a professional journalist myself for a number of years. The line can get blurred, as in the case of Mayfield Fowler who, at this point, is no longer a citizen journalist. She is a full-blown professional journalist, no matter what anyone says.

I listened to those defending Fowler’s recording Bill Clinton without his knowledge of her being a blogger or of her audio recorder. The defense sounded familiar. She’s indeed a “stringer,” a freelance journalist, and I was one for a major newspaper. As a stringer, I could take certain liberties that staff reporters couldn’t. One being that I legally didn’t have to identify myself as working for the newspaper, particularly if I had my own corporation (which was my employer of record, according to the IRS, and not the newspaper). In fact, I could do “pretext,” basically pretend to be anyone I wanted to be, in person or on the phone. I could, in fact, outright deny working for the newspaper that had assigned me. These are the arguments people were making for why it was okay for Fowler to not tell Bill Clinton who she was (though maybe they didn’t state them as bluntly as I just did). And, legally, they are all good arguments. I could have just as easily done the same thing she did. And I have on a number of occasions.

The problem I have with citizen journalists is that there is much more to professional journalism than writing a story or doing an interview. Professionals have strong research skills and a good working knowledge of the laws that apply to them. A good stringer has a first amendment attorney on speed dial and libel/slander law committed to memory. They have an address book filled with SMEs (subject matter experts) to call upon when needed. They verify what they’re writing from as many sources as it takes to feel certain about the content. Some newspapers have a three-source rule – if you get a story from one person, you must verify it with at least two others independent of that original source. Some papers will settle for only two sources, but it’s best to go with three. To me, it’s doubtful that the average “citizen journalist” has enough knowledge or the resources to really do the job of journalism the way it must be done. Thus the idea of handing out assignments to citizen journalists is one I don’t particularly like. I doubt any news organization worth its salt would assign a story to someone who doesn’t meet the criteria of a professional journalist, at least not without someone putting a lot of effort into vetting what that person has done.

In every way, citjour meets the definition of an avant garde proposed by the art critic Harold Rosenberg.

Except Rosenberg was referring to intellectuals, wasn't he?

Josh Marshall ain't no intellectual. Neither are his staff or followers, sorry to say.

Well, then, just citjour ass down and write something whenever you feel like it, and let us decide if it qualifies as "educational" or "informative", but please, don't wait for approval, there's no oppressive authority around here ti inhibit your free-flow of ideas.

Viva la blogs and Hail the New Pamphleteers.

It is US.

"I think it's important to distinguish between the reputation of an institution and the reputation of an individual. But we shouldn't mistake longevity of institutions for reliability and trustworthiness, because the individuals making up the institution change. An institution can only be as good as its individuals."

We've overlapped here. Sorry for answering what you already know.

You can follow the news about the news if you want. Some of that might be useful. Especially when the rest of the world is rehashing you know what. Murrow and Cronkite. A lot more there perhaps.

And some new primary source accounts are rumored in the works. Apparently more about RFK also. The fifty year mark in history is a watershed. Old secrets and stories start turning up and info is de-classified. It would be interesting to follow how important facts remained unknown, came to light, and how any news outlet made that happen or did not. Interesting who gets to write the history first. Who gets there first is issue. And first on the block is the big boy or girl with whom to reckon.

Oh boy, got a lot to say. Really disagree with your positive spin on things. Will divide it into two parts. Don't feel you have to respond, just think of me as using your thread to round up my thoughts about it. Take em or leave em, but I really do think you should read the Lemann New Yorker article I link to.

-----

First comment.

I think we've got a semantics problem here. What you call citizen journalism, I don't think many others think of as citizen journalism. Citizen journalism is amateurs getting up out their jammies and actually going and doing some reporting from somewhere where something is happening. Not blogging, actual reporting.

What's more, I don't think the examples you use would agree to the label either.

I am willing to bet that Juan cole would reject the label of "citizen journalist." He is an analyst of news reporting by professional journalist reporters in English and Arabic, reporters whose work he does not deign to claim as his own but rather, appreciates highly and lauds at times. He's a news aggregator and scholar who analyzes the reporting he gathers, and then sometimes adds punditry. He's a blogger, a diarist of that activity.

Josh Marshall is a professional journalist, not a citizen journalist. He was a professional journalist before he formed TPM Media, LLC, and now he's a publisher of professional media, with employees and offices. He mostly blogs now rather than reporting. He blogs using reporting from other sources, professional reporters, he links to those, and, like Juan Cole, he analyzes and sometimes is a pundit. Any original reporting he does is mostly from tips from contacts, like the professional journalist he is. Most of what he links to is by professional journalists, not citizen journalists. When he announced hiring staff, he made it sound like he was going to send them to do original reporting on Congressional hearings and the like, which would make them professional journalists, but I haven't seen much of that happen. Most of what Greg Sargent et. al. still do is use the work of professional reporters and put his own spin on it. They sometimes do original reporting, like get a quote from a pol on the phone, or are invite to a conference call, but it's still so rare that everyone in comments congratulates them as if it's a big rare deal.

You mention Riverbend and call her a citizen journalist, too. Well, was Anne Frank's diary citizen journalism? I guess some might like to reframe it that way. Myself, I don't like thinking of individual diaries of people's feelings and opinions and what happened during their day as journalism. They used to call them "human interest stories," they were my Mom's favorite reading in The Milwaukee Journal everyday for decades. She often sent me clippings of the ones she liked. Nothing new or revolutionary there.

What did we learn, news-wise, journalism-wise, from Riverbend about the Iraq war? Well, we were mostly told how horrible the U.S. was for doing what it was doing, and the effects on her society and subculture. It was the touching and sometimes eloquent view of a Sunni elite woman who had it quite good under Saddam Hussein, and was meant to have us feel what she was feeling. Here's one problem though, To her last posts, she maintained that everyone in Iraq got along so very well until the U.S. invaded, and that life was good. Do you think that if a Shiite kid from Sadr city had been able to afford a computer and the internet in 2003 or 2004, he would have painted the same picture? You'd like to call that journalism? I'd call it a diary, Anne Frank style. That's not journalism, an attempt to report the full situation.

I think that when you go to Salam Pax instead (disclosure: I was a big fan and interacted with him from time to time) there you really do get into something that ventures into the realms of journalism. It was still a diary, and nothing new in form, radical and new in content and style, perhaps, but it was more on the level of journalistic import as Samuel Pepys. what Salam did showed great talent, journalistically and in other ways, and was recognized while he was still anonymous by people like William Gibson as well as many professional journalists, and after he "came out," he and his friend Ghaith Abdul-Ahad went immediately into professional journalism. (You know, the Iraqi blogger that was a dentist, he did reporting, too, can't remember his name, he did much more reporting than any of the others, mho, he actually would go out and report stuff that was happening to OTHER people, less about himself. But everyone ignored him here in the U.S., because he was initially supportive of the invasion. But he would really go out and get facts and photos of things that were happening on the ground.)

I think that Citizen journalists doing work of sufficient quality to be of value for journalistic uses, like Salam Pax, are very rare birds, and end up being professional journalists quite quickly.

-----

Second comment:

On the old TPMCafe, Oct. 4, 2006, member Maynard did a great post this topic. I thought it was so good I put it on favorites for TPMCafe, it was once here at this url:
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/maynard/2006/oct/04/citizen_journalism_on_teh_intarweb
That's still off-line in the archive that they've been promising to upload for months, not available. Maybe some day it will be again.

Fortunately, I found just found a copy on Maynard's own blog:

citizen journalism on teh intarweb

By maynard - Posted on 04 October 2006

The rise of citizen journalism. Everyone is talking about it. Soon, the citizen journalist will rise up against The Man and eclipse those mainstream corporate media outlets, finally freeing the intellectual plebeian masses to "get the story out" and rock that vote!

Or maybe not.

Herein I examine two cases of citizen journalism on Dailykos and one on The Inquirer, the culmination of all which leaves me wondering if -- perhaps -- we ought to register and license journalists as we do physicians and attorneys....

read the whole thing at the link. I agree with it. I think it still applies.

What's missing though is the comments, a couple of us commented on Maynard's thread on it here, the discussion that followed is lost now, unfortunately. I recall in comments I included a link to blogger Stirling Newberry relatively concurrent post on the topic, who was posting as a columnist here for a short while, which angrily bloviated in triumphantlist manner on the wonders of all that groovy blog reportin'going on and what it was going to do to cause a revolution, because Nick Lemann had just written New Yorker magazine piece saying that the promised wonders of citizen journalism were not yet apparent. Then we got into Mr. Newberry's record of often extremely exaggerated credentials as to his experience in the world of finance and economics, and how when he got caught lying about one he would just change to another. And how absurd his writing was, and how because he wrote long screeds with fancy words, convoluted sentences and stream of consciousness about big giant global topics he had a bunch of fans who thought he was saying something neato even though they weren't quite sure what. I think Stirling Newberry is responsible for putting a lot of bullshit economic nonsense theory into people's heads, that's mostly what he's accomplished.

Anyhow, here's The New Yorker piece:

The Wayward Press: Amateur Hour,
Journalism without journalists.
by Nicholas Lemann, August 7, 2006.

I agree with most of what Lemann said, too.

The citizen journalist thing was a big bust when Maynard was writing his post and Lemann was writing his article in 2006. It still is, it mostly sucks, as Lemann implies, it's mostly church bulletin quality. There is virtually nothing of quality happening. Quality writers and reporters are quality from the getgo and can manage to go professional quite quickly, just not always enough to make a full salary living.

What useful original citizen journalism has occurred here on TPMCafe? Can you give me some examples? I remember some scintillating reports of "how much fun I had at the Obama rally", that's about it. I mean real reporting, not regurgitation of someone else's work, or research of documents. Whoop-te-do, we're going to save civilization with that, at minimum really cause a Demo win with that hot reporting?

What useful has happened that we didn't have before? I can think of a couple things, maybe. People can take pictures of tornadoes on their cell phones now. Then can also take them of flashers on the subway and post them on the internet and hope that that will blackmail the perp into never doing it again. Which is fine because we all hate flashers, but then, what happens when the fundie Christian starts taking them of unmarried couples making out and posting those on the internet? Will that be cool too? Ok, there was a lot of local useful info. on the net during Katrina, but it really was of the church bulletin variety, subsitute disaster for church--anything that was of import when that kind of disaster happens has been ending up as cell phone call-in coverage on the cable news channels and radios for the last couple of decades now. Nothing really new.

I just got more news, a summary of everything political that was agonized over and posted on and discussed ad nauseum on this website for the last week, plus a lot more world and national news, with more balance, from flipping through the current issue of U.S. News & World Report for 20 minutes. Now that's a pretty lousy news magazine, always has been, but has more original reporting in it than has been done on this website in an entire week. This website is mostly all regurgitation of the news professional reporters gather and then some professional analysis of that reporting and loads of amateur punditry on the stories reported by professional reporters. How is that going to change anything except make possibly make things worse than MSM?

Which brings us to current "citizen journalism" as practiced by Mayhill Fowler, and Jay Rosen's ridiculous twist and turns trying to defend in her work what he would be blasting if any professional journalist did it, just because he has so much invested in the idea that teh internet tubes have revolutionized news gathering. On Mayhill Fowler, I agree TPMCafe member Lally, here.

artappraiser:

Awesome comments! I agree with your take, including:

Really disagree with your positive spin on things.

I don't often disagree with Billy, but about this I do.

Josh Marshall is a professional journalist, not a citizen journalist. . . . He mostly blogs now rather than reporting.

There is a big difference between blogging and reporting.

Josh and staff do no substantive original reporting. They do editorializing on other people's reporting.

I know this because I can go to Yahoo News (of all places) and see a story there first before I see it at TPM. As far as I can tell, TPM simply reads the AP, Politico, and Chuck Todd (sometimes Mark Halperin via Ben Smith) and then writes up something. I have often thought the TPM boys were in total hero-worship awe of Ben Smith. Smith/Politico seems to be TPM's model. However, TPM never gets the story, whereas Smith does.

(One time Greg Sargent linked to a Ben Smith "story" that linked back to Greg Sargent: "See Ben Smith for more"; "See Greg Sargent for more." You really can't get lazier than that.)

Furthermore, TPM readers post more current "news flashes" than TPM staff does, which they happen upon from sources other than Politico or Chuck Todd. I've watched Greg and Eric repeatedly take a Recent Reader Post and make an article out of it. In other words, TPM mines the reader posts for "leads." That's pathetic. Why? Because TPM presents itself as a political news blog, when it's really a recycling hub.

Finally, Josh periodically petitions his readers to send him e-mails of story leads. In that way he makes us feel important, like reporters on the ground. That's why I say he's an opportunist: out of sheer laziness (or cheapness) he exploits his readers for free work.

I've done the job myself, in print and online. I know what goes into it. TPM's staff is too small to provide the quality Josh's reputation garners.

Here's my biggest beef, however: people ought to get paid, at least with a byline credit/hat tip if not a token payment for doing the basic legwork. That's why there are unions for journalists, so writers aren't exploited. Citizen journalism will never take off because citizens quickly figure out they should get paid for writing! At the very least, they figure out they can start their own blog and reap all the attention they rightly deserve.

There is virtually nothing of quality happening. Quality writers and reporters are quality from the getgo and can manage to go professional quite quickly, just not always enough to make a full salary living.

What useful original citizen journalism has occurred here on TPMCafe?

I've never seen any.

Oh, heh, here's another thing I read recently. While everyone is bemoaning supposed McCain trolls after bemoaning supposed Clinton trolls for months, there's new version truthiness acoming to add to the mix:

One area in particular where Mr. Obama is adding muscle is a team that is tasked with tracking down rumors and erroneous statements circulated on the Internet.

“The growth of the Internet, which has been a fabulous asset for helping to build the Obama community, is also a place where erroneous e-mails live,” said Anita Dunn, a senior campaign adviser. “That’s a challenge I don’t think previous campaigns have had to deal with to the extent that the Obama campaign has.”

Speaking of paid campaign operatives, where did prolific posters of "yay Obama" campaign news like Bionic Soy go all of a sudden once it was clear that Obama had the nomination?

Was someone like Bionic Soy participating in good faith on a blog forum like this? To push your candidate's talking points? Rarely to even discuss, just post? Is that what "citizen journalism" and it's effects on politics going to be? Then it's not any different than the Carville-Stephanopolus-Matalin war rooms of 92.

To tell you the truth, when the software change happened here, and the flood of bloggers from Election Central burst through, what I as a reader saw was tons and tons of posts echoing the campaigns' talking points of the day. Like a huge machine, spewing the talking points. It was hard for me to believe that at least half of the posts weren't being generated by a morning email from the campaigns, i.e., "now go forth and post on this topic on blogs."

I don't understand the angst about McCain bloggers now, I doubt I will see much difference from what I have seen being done on the Reader Blog pages for months now by Obama supporters and to a lesser extent, Clinton supporters.

I haven't seen any evidence yet on this site that anything revolutionary has happened as far as politics. The campaigns simply get their talking points more amplified than they did previously by enlisting an army of volunteers to get the P.R. buzz going. Previously, they had to persuade the MSM media to take up those talking points, and they always didn't go along. But now the have internet "supporters" to do that who are also political junkies. Now the MSM can see on the internet which talking points sell to the political junkie audience, and they do those talking points in their own medium.

Billy, artappraiser, workerbee:

In thinking about this conversation, I stumbled upon an article by David Glenn in the Sept/Oct 2007 Columbia Journalism Review called The (Josh) Marshall Plan about Josh's career path and his operation model for TPM. Well worth a read. It basically confirms what I've observed upthread: That TPM culls (aggregates) news from other sources rather than generates original reporting:

When asked whether he would rather have more staff resources devoted to original reporting, [Marshall] says, “I think we’ve got our percentages down pretty well. I think it’s key to our model that we don’t draw a clear distinction” between original reporting and aggregation. Marshall favors such a mix because he wants his reporters to serve as the “narrators” of complex, slowly unfolding stories. “Sometimes that will mean walking our readers through what’s being published elsewhere,” he says.

iow, Greg Sargent is a "narrator." And this means that any one TPM story is only as good as the narrator who tells it. Interesting.

This "aggregate" approach and heavy use of unpaid staff and reader contributions means TPM is susceptible to being fed propaganda. I'm guessing that's what the Obama campaign did more effectively than the Clinton campaign: they fed all of the progressive blogs better propaganda than the Clinton campaign did during the primary contest. (I'd love to interview Peter Daou about this.)

I'll never forget how the RFK assassination comment "story" broke: TPM had completely stopped reporting on Hillary's campaigning, when all of a sudden one day, Greg announces we can watch Hillary give an interview with the South Dakota Argus Leader ("as if" we'd want to, Greg added sarcastically, downplaying such a bizarre invitation).

I was struck by how off-script and peculiar it was for TPM to announce any Clinton news whatsoever. Of course I watched the interview. Next thing I knew, the shit had hit the fan, and Greg was stoking the fires with a one-sided account, complete with an inflammatory headline and a passively accusatory "statement" from Bill Burton. How could Burton have come out with a statement so quickly, I wondered. When I read Greg's manipulative piece, it was clear to me the story had been a set-up: like we were small children placed in front of the TV to keep us entertained. Once our attention had been directed, it was easy to set off a fake explosion that we could then react to. It was exactly like an Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds.

What wasn't clear to me then (and still isn't) is whether TPM got paid by the Obama campaign to push O-positive stories all along. Now that I read the CJR article, however, it may be that unpaid newbie pro-Obama interns "aggregated" the primary news coverage on this site. For all we know, David Axelrod deliberately sent interns to work at TPM and other progressive blogs in December 2007.

Anyway, here's something interesting from the article about TPM's finances:

Marshall’s first explicit call for reader contributions came in late 2003, when he successfully asked for support to cover his travel costs for a ten-day trip to New Hampshire during primary season. (That appeal netted $6,000 in twenty-four hours.) In early 2005, he passed the hat for a far larger amount, to support the launch of TPM Café. That appeal netted $40,000, and allowed Marshall to hire his first full-time colleague. Another fund drive later that year took in $80,000, which permitted the hiring of Rood and Kiel and the creation of TPM Muckraker. As recently as this past March, Marshall asked for money to support a further staff expansion. Marshall says that on three occasions, he has received donations of $1,000, but never anything larger; the vast majority of his readers’ gifts, he says, are in the range of twenty to fifty dollars.

Josh has his readers convinced he's barely making ends meet. Seems to me there are actually some tricky legal issues here (some journalism job descriptions in NY are governed by the journalists' union). In any case, I certainly hope Josh offers his staff good health insurance.

The rest of the article provides good food-for-thought about the citjour idea.

P.S. for Billy: Josh lost his mother at the age of 12.

and lastly

LOL
OMG

and I'm soooo happy for you I'm giving you a big *hug* right now.

I can *feel* you, and you know that you * feel* what I feel....
we're like, OMG feeling this together.....

This is the crap-speak of kids. It's nice for them I guess. It's not helping them write papers in school, but *heck* we don't need that in our culture. LOL.

And why wouldn't grownups want to act like their kids, to seem cool and included, to regress into barbie and ken dolls, to play house in the wiki wiki iWorld? Why not? It's like, well....I can't find the right word for that so .... :)

;) is fine from someone who has a vocabulary and understands how to use words and doesn't use a smiley face instead of words but as a net-glyph. It's the others that don't who bother me, as the vocabulary they once used is forgotten.

Therefor I don't place :) and its variants in my crap-speak dictionary. It's just slang. Ain't bad neither. :)

it's sooo easy to become mean yourself among mean people.

LOL

Trail is rocky Billy, but the sky has no echo.

Well, I'm certainly bamboozled, I'll tell you that.

Billy, I've been meaning to tell you that what you want to do, as I understand it, is a shitload of work.

You need to assess how much time you are willing to put in. A lot? Good.

Donnerpass's suggestion to start by writing reviews is the old-school way of doing things. That's certainly one way to go about it: by starting at the bottom. His suggestion for just starting a blog is another option.

Depending on what kind of "portfolio" you have (meaning previously published pieces, if any), I personally think you can leapfrog many of those old-school steps these days by blogging. But even that is a shitload of work.

I worked briefly with a very talented guy on his progressive political blog. He posted daily and wanted to train a pool of guest writers to take some pressure off writing every day. That's where I came in, as an editor. As Donnerpass says, I edited "the crap out of" people. That's because "hot" takes an unbelievable amount of work. As I said before, anyone can write, but only a few can write well. (Only a few can rewrite well, too, as it turns out.) But even those who can't write (or think) well can get published, although what they've written is not necessarily "hot."

So, what are your standards for this project? High? Literary? Casual? Raw? Experimental? I haven't seen many writers here at TPM with half the talent you have, Billy. That doesn't mean they aren't here, just that I'm personally not blown away by too many posts. I enjoy many of the personas here, but for me, that's different.

If you want to form a collective, you need a group of people who are at least as talented as you are. Also, it takes a lot of trust between the people involved, and you need to have a specific focus. Do you really want to write about politics? Do you want to blow the whistle on progressive blogs? on the government? on something else? Or do you want to write fiction? Or do you want to write memoir? Or do you want to create something new, a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction? What do you want to write for The New Yorker? Fiction or nonfiction?

Who do you know? Make a list. Who do they know? Ask them. Who do you know who has money to invest in your project? Do you really want to work with other bloggers/ writers/ citjours, or do you really want a solo gig? Do you get your ideas from bouncing off other people? Is that why you're thinking about a group effort?

How much do you want to hustle? How brave are you? How much of a risk-taker are you? Have you ever done anything like what you have in mind?

Obviously I don't know you personally, Billy, but I'd say you must be in a creative period in your life. I say that because of the different forms of writing you've played with on this site. I think your writing is good enough that you have the potential to get published pretty much anywhere. I just think you need to work with an editor to get something in shape before you solicit someone to publish it.

I find your idea very interesting and appealing, I just want to know more about it. These are just some thoughts and questions I wanted to share based on the experiences I've had in publishing and working on blogs. I hope I'm not totally off-base with what you have in mind for your project. If I am, I apologize.