Citizen journalism vs. Traditional media

There's an interesting story in this week's New Yorker about "citizen journalism."

Nicholas Lemann basically defends traditional media from what he boils down to puffed-up rhetoric about the threat of bloggers and online "journalism without journalists."

(He defines citizen journalism as Web sites that publish contributions by people who don't have jobs in news organizations but are performing similar jobs. He also sites a Pew study that showed that there are 12 million bloggers in the U.S., 34 percent of whom consider blogging to be a form of journalism. That would mean, Lemann points out, that there are now 4 million new journalists so the profession must have increased thousand-fold in no time.)

In looking at the affect of citizen journalism and bloggers (which I think are distinct, but he seems to lump them together here), he took a historical approach, siting how traditional media have been challenged in the past. In the end, the result has always been a more balanced approach to news-gathering.

Such is his argument about what many are seeing as a threat to journalism as we know it. He noted that it serves a purpose - compiling several news sources into a single spot, providing details and anecdotes from the scene (i.e. all the Internet accounts from New Orleans during Katrina), and of course a forum for opinion and debate. But it's still the more traditional journalists that are publishing the day to day accurate accounts of world events.

He contends that journalists still have a place here (phew!).

"The Internet is not unfriendly to reporting; potentially it is the best reporting medium ever invented. ... To keep pushing in that direction, though, requires that we hold up original reporting as a virtue and use the Internet to find new ways of presenting fresh material - which, inescapably, will wind up being produced by people who do that full time, not "citizens" with day jobs.

For the most part, I agree with Lemann, but caution that he is shaking off the affect of bloggers and citizen journalism on traditional media. OK, so there is a place for reporters, but we can't so quickly dismiss how much blogs and people taking the role of reporters has forced media to reexamine itself. And that reexamination is necessary, and should continue. The new media should push the status quo, so that tradition media doesn't, for example, kowtow to the government or get lazy or just gray and fizzle out.

Anyway, my book report aside, I thought it was story worth reading.

In a somewhat related idea, I cover a local county for the my newspaper, and it turns out there are four blogs dedicated to this county. From the upcoming elections, to zoning issues to wildlife-spotting, this group of bloggers is interested in all things County. I thought it to be kind of strange that someone would care enough to write about what they are reading in the news, their opinions, and generally what they are seeing in their day to day live in suburban Maryland. But I do go to the blogs often to see what people are talking about and what I might be missing.