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Learning to be a Citizen Journalist

The concept of Citizen Journalism has been bouncing around for a long time but the rise of blogging has given new meaning to the term as millions of people are now sharing their thoughts online. Wikipedia has an extensive definition of Citizen Journalism stating first that it is also known as participatory journalism. While sharing thoughts alone is not journalism, it is participatory. People who consider themselves Citizen Journalists tend to write about events and topics that are bigger than themselves but they often have a personal connection to the topic. This makes it more interesting to write about could also influence their perspective and introduce bias to the reporting.

This brings up the question of whether companies, news organizations or other online writers should take on the responsibility to educate the masses about how to be a good journalist. Steve Outing wrote an interesting article about who should train Citizen Jounalists on EMedia today . Steve suggests that news organizations should offer programs to train anyone to write.

I think this is a great idea for everyone from teenagers to retirees including all of us in between. In fact, there are several news organizations that offer classes for journalism such as Poynter Online and community papers such as The Standard-Times, my hometown paper. I've been taking a community journalism class for the last few weeks at the S-T even though I've been writing for trade publications for years. It's been great and I encourage other business people, especially marketers to do the same. Journalism requires a more rigorous approach to fact gathering and balance. The S-T wasn't focused on online journalism when they designed the class but I think the same rules of good writing and reporting apply.

As David Humphrey, the special projects editor of the Standard-Times stated in the first class: "The five essentials to good journalism are: Accuracy, Balance, Clarity, Humanity and Brevity."

I'm still working on a few of these...

Posted by Julie Woods on April 14, 2005 at 06:42 PM | Email this post Permalink

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