[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Citizen Journalism: In With the New

Mon Jun 9 17:02:55 MDT 2008

by Bill Boyarsky

Truthdig (May 22 2008)

In the world of conventional journalists - my old world - the idea of a
non-journalist, a "civilian", doing our work is an outrage.

No matter that one of the best editors I know says writing a good
straight news story is nothing more than a "parlor trick". No matter
that one of the best young reporters of my acquaintance learned to write
news stories not in journalism school but by copying and rewriting
stories from The New York Times and other papers.

In our minds, journalism is a high-church mixture of complex rules,
codes, practices, skills, traditions and taboos. If not exactly a
religion in our minds, we certainly consider it a "calling", open only
to those who receive and accept the mysterious call.

But with the rise of the Internet, no call is necessary. Spurred on by a
historic presidential election, an increasing number of people are
engaged in journalism on the Web. They are changing journalism for the
better. Their impact will be felt in not only national politics but in
something often more important: the coverage of city councils, mayors,
neighborhoods, schools, crime, health care, poverty and other important
aspects of life in America's cities and towns.

Some are amateurs, as in the case of contributors to OffTheBus, a
presidential campaign site sponsored by The Huffington Post and
NewAssignment.net. Truthdig, on the other hand, is produced largely by
pros. The diversification of the media is a welcome development,
especially in the coverage of the presidential campaign. Political
journalism has become rooted in the obvious. It's boring and
mind-numbingly conventional.

When I was a young political writer for the Associated Press, then a
bastion of conventional journalism, I used to escape its restrictions by
writing part time for a small liberal magazine in Los Angeles called
Frontier. It was against AP rules, but I correctly figured my bosses
would never read the magazine.

The late Phil Kerby, the Frontier editor who later won a Pulitzer Prize
as an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, urged me to stick it
to those crooked lobbyists and legislators. These lectures were followed
by his cautionary advice to be correct and careful. Kerby was a
colleague of the late Carey McWilliams, a great historian and editor of
The Nation. When Frontier folded, The Nation took it over. From working
for Kerby and from reading and knowing McWilliams, I learned to deal
with ideas, to develop my opinions and to back them up with solid
reporting and direct, straight-ahead writing.

A much less positive experience occurred at the Los Angeles Times when I
was covering the 1976 presidential campaign.

The industrial belt was turning into the rust belt, and I reported on
what was obviously the decline of American heavy industry. I'd arrive in
a city knowing nobody and then would dig out my story. I loved the work,
and the stories were played on Page 1. But a friendly editor told me I
was making a big mistake, that my colleagues were getting more notice in
the office by riding the campaign bus. I switched to covering Jimmy
Carter's presidential campaign and spent the fall in the campaign
cocoon. After election day, I quit political writing and returned to Los
Angeles as a general assignment reporter for the Times. My family was a
big reason for abandoning something I had done full time for many years.
But another reason was that I no longer respected the work. I didn't
think riding the bus was real reporting.

I made it to columnist and then city editor, jobs I had always wanted,
and retired from the Times. When I began blogging for LA Observed, a
site featuring local news and comment, and writing about politics for
Truthdig, I saw their potential and compared it to what Carey McWilliams
and Phil Kerby accomplished outside journalism's mainstream with their
gutsy and well-reported publications. I sometimes think of McWilliams
and Kerby when trying to live up to the freedom I have been given on the
Internet.

As I immersed myself in the Internet, OffTheBus, an effort to harness
the energy and intelligence of interested amateurs in covering the
campaign, attracted my attention. Such amateurs are called "citizen
journalists". As a traditionalist, I was skeptical and was reminded of
an old anti-Ronald Reagan speech, given when he was an actor-citizen
politician running for governor, that included a line that went
something like: "Hi. I'm your citizen pilot. I've never flown a plane
before, but I have always had a deep interest in aviation."

But the editorial director of OffTheBus is my friend and USC faculty
colleague, Marc Cooper, a Nation contributing editor and definitely a
Carey McWilliams-Phil Kerby kind of journalist. Having stepped off the
bus myself years ago, the name of the project intrigued me.

OffTheBus was started by Jay Rosen, an NYU journalism professor and
Internet communications pioneer, and Arianna Huffington, founder of the
Web's Huffington Post. She was interested in a project for the 2008
campaign. He wanted to mobilize large numbers of "people who are not
professional reporters". They would devote much of their attention to
finding out what was happening on the ground and what concerned voters.

Directing the project is Amanda Michel, an Internet organizing veteran
of the Howard Dean presidential campaign, the first such successful
political effort on the Web. She also worked John Kerry's campaign later
that year and with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Michel, editorial director Cooper and managing editor John Tomasic
compose the project's paid staff. Everyone else is a volunteer.

"We rely on the wisdom of the mass [the volunteers]", Cooper told me.
"But it is mediated and edited by professionals. We get the best of both
worlds."

The most notable OffTheBus contribution to the campaign came from
citizen journalist Mayhill Fowler. She is an unpublished fiction and
nonfiction writer and a Senator Barack Obama supporter who, according to
the Federal Elections Commission, has given the senator $2,000.

She volunteered for OffTheBus when she heard of it. Fowler first wrote
about grass-roots Obama campaigning within driving range of her home on
the Oakland-Berkeley border. Soon, with two grown daughters away at
Princeton and a lawyer-husband at home, she took off on the campaign
trail, following the Obama bus in a rented car. She has a great eye and
a unique style.

After returning to the Bay Area from her travels, she was alerted to an
Obama fundraiser in San Francisco's rich Pacific Heights neighborhood.
She called two Obama supporters she knew for permission to attend, which
was granted. "They knew I was a reporter", she told me.

She heard Obama say something that has caused him trouble ever since she
reported it: "You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and
like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now
for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the
Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive
administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna
regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get
bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't
like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way
to explain their frustrations."

Traditionalists in the press thought Fowler had somehow broken some of
the craft's rules. One deals with what is off the record. This rule is
so loose and confusing that I have never been able to completely
understand it. The traditional press wasn't invited to the fundraiser,
meaning it was closed to the press but apparently not off the record. (I
have never heard of this variation of the rule). Nobody stopped Fowler
from taking and recording notes. Nor did anyone stop other attendees who
brought video and audio recorders.

The second rule deals with contributing to campaigns. Traditionalists
say Fowler should not write about Obama because she is one of his
contributors. I don't agree with that. I'm not one of those journalists
who brag about never voting. I never miss an election. What's the
difference between, on the one hand, voting, and defending my choices at
dinner parties, and, on the other, contributing? When I covered the
conservative movement and Ronald Reagan, I made it a point to tell my
right-wing sources that I was a liberal Democrat. I wanted to be honest.
They accepted that, and some sources became drinking companions. After
Reagan was elected governor, an aide offered me a job as a press
secretary. I said no, I was just starting to get ahead in my job at the
Associated Press. "Anyway, " I added, "you know I don't agree with a
thing he believes in". The aide dismissed the point, saying Reagan liked
me and thought I was a straight shooter.

Individual journalism, such as Fowler's, is just part of the OffTheBus
report. Its most significant contribution is assembling groups of
citizen journalists for special projects. Project director Michel,
experienced in political organization, puts these projects together.

Early in the campaign, she assigned volunteers to accompany Obama
canvassers on a national canvassing day. As a matter of fact, she said,
some of the OffTheBus volunteers were also Obama canvassers. They asked
the same questions and turned in the answers on forms that Michel tabulated.

The OffTheBus crew found that contrary to what most journalists were
reporting, the economy rather than the war was the biggest concern.

How could Michel trust the Obama volunteers as reporters?  All the
reports had the same findings, she said, whether they came from plain
reporters or Obama canvasser reporters.

Another project was an in-depth look at the backgrounds of the
superdelegates. The information is available on the OffTheBus Web site.

I read OffTheBus every day and see it as a work in progress, breaking
new ground and old rules, and producing analyses that can be as tired as
anything in the traditional media. But in general, OffTheBus offers a
fresh and imaginative look at the campaign. "We are learning as we are
going", said editorial director Cooper. "We are trying to make up the
rules as we go along.  We really don't have a guide ... We found in our
early work that it is not so easy to get people to do good journalism.
We don't want to downplay or discard the old skills."

The model of a professional staff reading and fact-checking the work of
amateurs is something that newspapers, with their increasingly small
staffs and growing inability to connect with readers, should consider.
When I was city editor of the Times, we had a hard time figuring out how
to cover our huge area. I think something like this would have helped.

Most of all, it's imaginative. It dares to challenge old ways. The
presidential campaign is historic for a few reasons, not the least of
which is the opening up of that mysterious "calling", journalism.
_____

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer.
Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080522_citizen_journalism_in_with_the_new/TO
POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/