Yvette Wohn

The final report of Media Re:public, a MacArthur-funded project assessing the state of news in the digital era is now out and downloadable through the Berkman website. I posted a short wrap-up of the findings earlier this year.

I didn’t contribute much to this project (much less than I would have liked to)- just did a short case study of Baristanet, a hyper-local news site based in New Jersey.

Reporting in the age of web 2.0 has a new element: aggregating information from first-hand online sources and presenting it in an orderly fashion.

First-hand online sources used to be online press releases, or government-released documents, (compared to reporting from second-hand online sources such as local newspapers) but thanks to the at-large reporting community, the pool of first-hand sources is expanding– exponentially. Through Twitter, Flickr, blogs, and other sites that support real-time content, one can get updates on the situation without leaving the country. The recent tragedy in Mumbai was a great example.

I’m not suggesting that fieldwork is not important, but the definition of “journalist” is getting blurry. How is a journalist different from a reporter? If we are we using the term “participatory journalism” instead of “participatory reporting?” does than mean the definition of journalism has already changed, despite legacy media’s reluctance to acknowledge it? Most probably in the future, journalists will have a bigger editorial role in aggregating information, weighing it, and presenting it to those of us who don’t have time (nor want to spend the time) visiting various Twitter feeds or reading multiple blog sites. Then we should have to coin a new term for journalists who do their own legwork.

But I don’t think we should be pessimistic about the new technologies that are changing journalism. Even in Web 1.0, hyperlinks totally changed journalism. Although there are downsides of hyperlinks, they are great in providing information because digital articles can easily direct people to more detailed information– something print articles couldn’t do.

As mentioned earlier in a post about my thoughts on citizen reporting (NOT journalism), NYT Noam Cohen writes about the recent Apple drop after unverified news regarding Steve Jobs’ health. Noting this trend way before Cohen, Prof. Harry Lewis fears that a similar thing will happen with the election at the last minute.

Although not related to journalism, a similar thing did happen with the 2002 presidential election in Korea. It was somewhat a close campaign between the conservative Lee Hoi-chang and more liberal Roh Moo-hyun. (One must note that in Korea, the concept of conservatism, liberalism, and so forth are quite different in dimension than that of the U.S. Given political history and surrounding countries, lefties are more closely associated with socialism in Korea than lefties in the U.S.)

Roh had already had quite a savvy Internet-centered campaign, very much like Obama (only in terms of Internet savviness- Roh didn’t have any higher education) whereas the Lee campaign was extremely ignorant of the Internet, no thanks to campaign organizers who ignored consultants and younger net-savvy campaign members. It was a close campaign, but many polls showed that Lee still had a slight edge. What gave Roh the final push, however, was in the last hours of election day.

Now on election day, unless one is terribly committed to a certain candidate, one sometimes is too lazy to go to the poll. Netizens, however, stirred up a frenzy towards the end of the day, claiming that Roh was extremely far behind and each vote was of crucial matter. These messages, posted on forums and passed through mobile text messages mainly among young people, urged many young voters to go to the polls at the last minute. The interesting thing was that the % of young people who actually voted at all was lower than that of previous elections, but those who voted were more Roh’s fans than Lee’s. Analysts said that these votes were crucial in Roh’s victory. He only won by 580,000 votes.

I felt in the case of Korea, the Internet fostered a terrible echo chamber that supported an underqualified candidate and strongly disagree with a Berkman report that suggests that the citizen journalism site OhMyNews played a role in promoting democracy in its coverage of the elections. (OhMyNews’ role and its effect on freedom of speech and its involvement in the election coverage was an entirely different matter. That is, unless democracy is seen as something on par with echo chambers)

As a journalist, I cannot be entirely objective about citizen journalism- for starters, I don’t think citizen journalism should be allowed to be considered journalism as all. Although non-journalists have certainly contributed to the production of news, should they be called journalists? A more proper term, I think, for these passionate people, would be “news watchers” or something that has a slighter stronger nuance than “tipster.”

The reason I think these people should not be considered journalists is because journalists are supposed to adhere to facts, and while complete objectivity is hard to achieve, journalists have a moral obligation (or in many cases, news rooms have strict guidelines) to be fair.

Groundless rumors, however, generated on the Internet, are making their way into mainstream news without proper filtering. From malicious posts about celebrities to possible manipulations of the stock market (as seen in the latest rumor of Steve Jobs) people are out there writing all kinds of weird stuff. But publishing it on their blog is one thing- publishing it on a news site (or what some organizations claim is a news site) is different. Although I respect generativity and self-regulatory actions on the Web (such as those that can be seen on Wikipedia) news stories can’t wait that long to be confirmed. They should be confirmed before being published.

One reason for this is because now that operations such as stock trading are done by computers, a news story can affect one’s trading without even knowing or reading of the incorrect article. For instance, many people who trade stocks or foreign exchange usually preset a certain percentage so that the computer automatically sells or buys if the share price falls or rises by a certain percent. It’s not even the shareholder who is making a sales decision.

The Apple story in particular was a bit shocking because just two weeks ago in Prof. Lewis’ class, we looked at a case study from 2002 in which United Airlines’ stock was affected by a faulty news story. (this wasn’t the fault of a citizen journalist)

(cross-posted in arcticpenguin)