Citizen journalists do make the news

Hold the front page - citizen journalists can produce original news!

This came out of research by Zvi Reich of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel presented at the ICA annual conference in Montreal on Saturday. He looked at three mainstream news organisations in Israel and compared them to the Israeli citizen journalism site, Scoop.

What he found was that 52% of the material on Scoop were original news items, rather than opinion pieces or recycled fragments from the mainstream media.

This is an interesting finding, but it also seems to consider news from a professional journalistic perspective rather than questioning how we define what is news. At a time when there are so many sources of information, this is a key question for any research.

Perhaps more interesting was what Reich found about how citizen journalists got their stories. MSM reporters tend to rely on official sources and PR folks, whereas citizen journalists rely on either internet sources or being physically present at a news scene.

There was also a big difference in the patterns of sourcing. MSM reporters were in daily or weekly contact with sources, whereas around half of the time, citizen journalists contacted a source for the first time. They also tended to rely on a single source, with half of stories based on only one.

One other interesting difference was how these contacts were made. MSM reporters tended to use the phone, whereas their citizen counterparts relied on e-mail or face-to-face meetings.

Reich had some recommendations in his paper for the evolution of citizen journalism. For these new forms of news organisations to develop, he argued they needed both a critical mass of contributors and audiences.

But they face some challenges in doing this. First of all, Reich suggested, they need to stabilise their volunteer workforce, which is volatile by its very nature. They can also look at ways of helping citizen journalists function as reporters, for example by setting up training programmes, especially in terms of sourcing.

In this, Reich seems to suggest that citizen journalists should become more professional - in other words, more like mainstream journalists. This was picked up during the discussions by Natalie Fenton of Goldsmiths College in London.

She questioned whether we should be be applying the professional definitions of journalism and then using this as a standard to measure citizen journalism. Or whether there is a bigger question here in terms of what is journalism and what is news.