Blogging as a Form of Journalism Pt. 1

Blogging as a Form of Journalism, by J.D. Lasica.

External source – from Mark Deuze: The web and its journalisms

This article was first posted in 2001, and edited later in 2002. Lasica discusses how blogging can be a form of journalism. Lasica states that the blogging phenomenon may sow the seeds for new forms of journalism and public discourse – creating an online community.

“But a funny thing happened on the way to the Web’s irrelevance: the blogging phenomenon, a grassroots movement that may sow the seeds for new forms of journalism, public discourse, interactivity and online community.”

This is a very early post when the Internet was just beginning to thrive and become more accessible for people. Lasica explains what a blog is and the point of it.

Lasica talks with Paul Andrews, a journalist who owns his own blog. He argues that not everyone with a blog is a journalist, but professionals dismiss bloggers without taking the posts into consideration. Bloggers are considered amateurs and without a journalism degree, one is not a journalist.

Andrews points out that people are turning to the Internet and webloggers for news and information because mainstream news media has lost much of its credibility. This is something that just about everyone now knows.

Lasica also talks to Deborah Branscum who is a contributing editor for Newsweek. Branscum highlights four points that make weblogs attractive: Creative freedom, instantaneity, interactivity, and lack of marketing constraints.

This is just another thing that journalists in 2001-2002 were noticing and it has now become plain obvious why many create their own blogs.

Finally, Glenn Fleishman highlights one major advantage of weblogging. A blogger is not at the mercy of big media. A blogger can write about almost anything without being told by editors or anyone else to not publish their work. And bloggers are able to write extensively on something they feel passionate about.

It’s interesting that at the turn of the decade, the most obvious points of weblogging that everyone knows now were being discussed back then.

Keeping a close watch…

Keeping a close watch – the rise of self-surveillance and the threat of digital exposure.

In this article, Kingsley Dennis discusses the Rodney King beating and the rise of sousveillance. In 1991, Rodney King was severely beaten by LAPD officers after he disobeyed their orders to lie down. The LAPD officers did not notice that they were being taped by bystander George Holliday. This was an iconic moment of sousveillance.

Authorities and the state were now not the only one’s who could keep a close watch on citizens and other state’s. As technology advanced, citizens now had the ability to use video cameras an cell phone cameras to keep watch on authorities.

Citizen journalism is now a big part of mainstream news coverage. When reporters cannot reach the news fast enough, they rely on coverage from amateur reporters and citizens. Sure, the video might be a bit blurry, but it still tells some of the story as it happens.

Dog Shit Girl

The ability of sousveillance can have both positive and negative affects. In the hands of responsible users, sousveillance can hold authority figures such as politicians, and citizens such as the case of the Dog Shit Girl accountable for their actions. At the same time however, sousveillance can go a little too far.

In the case of the Dog Shit Girl, Internet users found the young woman and held her accountable for her actions. But Internet users went too far by spreading her personal information beyond just humiliating her for her actions. Dog Shit Girl’s privacy was violated.

I believe that Dog Shit Girl deserved her punishment – to an extent. Being publicly humiliated was enough of an punishment. Once her privacy was violated and she received comments such as: “Her life deserves to be ruined and she won’t kill herself because she is a thick-skinned bitch” is going too far.

Internet vigilantism

Sousveillance such as this is commonly called Internet vigilantism. This case is just one of the many that anonymous users online enact. The notorious website, 4Chan, has been using Internet vigilantism to its advantage for a very long time.

The most recent example is the defense of Wikileaks and web attacks on PayPal, Visa, and Amazon who have blocked donations from reaching Wikileaks.

Internet vigilantism has its advantage as I discussed above with helping to find those that have committed a crime and hold them accountable. At the same time, disadvantages are when vigilantism goes so far that it forces people into hiding and makes them worry for their own safety.

In the UK, Mary Bale dumped a cat into a wheelie bin and left it there. Her actions were captured on CCTV and the video went viral. 4Chan jumped on Bale’s actions and forced her to apologize.

However, Facebook groups titled “Death to Mary Bale” were created and police discussed Bale’s personal safety.

G2: Life through a lens

Stuart Jeffries argues that these days, having a mobile phone without a camera is absurd. Technology is so advanced and so accessible that now everyone has a mobile phone with 3G capabilities.

Cellphones are better, as Jeffries states, because they are more portable than digital cameras and can be snuck into places that do not allow cameras. Not only that, but cellphones have Wi-Fi and wireless capabilities that allow them to connect to the Internet from just about anywhere.

“They’re more portable than most digital cameras and, more importantly, offer faster connection with the Internet, which is a key consideration in this age of virtual presenteeism.”

A point that Jeffries makes is that we are viewing the world more through the lens of a camera than with our own eyes. If we are to go to the beach for example, we’ll take hundreds of photos of our experience there and maybe spend a minute or two looking at the scenery. We are so wired and have the need to post our lives online, that we do not take the time and relish life as it is.

Yet, the photos and videos from cellphone cameras have huge advantage. This advantage comes for indie music artists who are performing in small gigs around clubs, cafes etc. Usually, people who like the music pull out their cellphone and snap photos – and although the video quality is horrible when recording, the fans do it for the music.

These photos and videos are then posted on Facebook and other social networking websites that garner further attention and get free publicity for artists.

Cellphone cameras are also allowing citizens to become reporters. In the G20 protests in London of 2009, Ian Tomlinson was beaten to death by police officers. Other protestors captured this moment and shared it online. During the G20 Toronto Summit, the same thing happened as protestors captured photo and video of police brutality on peaceful demonstrators.

Camera-phones have challenged society quite  a bit over the last seven to eight years. They are revolutionary, and a great surveilling and sousveilling technology; just about everyone has a camera-phone.

Everyone is a media outlet

“Our social tools remove older obstacles to public expression, and thus remove the bottlenecks that characterized mass media. The result is the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals.”

In the beginning of this article, Shirky argues that mainstream news media completely missed the advent of the Internet. Instead of worrying about how the Internet could take over ad revenue through websites such as eBay and Craigslist, mainstream news media worried about competition from other mainstream news media outlets. Shirky also argues that mainstream news media were too slow to react to the Internet.

“Even as web sites like eBay and Craigslist were siphoning off the ad revenues that keep newspapers viable – job listings, classified ads, real estate – and weblogs were letting people like gnarlykitty publish to the world for free, the executives of the world’s newspapers were slow to understand the change, and even slower to react.”

Shirky is quite right about this. In the past five or six years, mainstream news media has taken a giant leap by realizing the potential of the Internet. News outlets such as CNN, CBC, The Guardian, etc. have all taken to the Internet and attracted many readers.

Because of the Internet and it’s accessibility to citizens, the news is becoming amateurized. Online, webloggers are considered journalists as they publish their own work and control their own means of production. Creating blog posts such as this one, is easy to do and I control my own means of production. Therefore, making me a journalist.

Now, everyone is a journalist. Everyone can publish their own work online. However, only a few have journalistic privilege – and they are professionals.

Finally, Shirky argues:

“The spread of literacy after the invention of movable type ensured not the success of the scribal profession but its end. Instead of mass professionalization, the spread of literacy was a process of mass amateurization.”

I wholly agree with this point and it is obvious from surfing the Internet, and the millions of blogs reporting the same news. Whether the publishers are professionals or amateurs, the news is now everywhere and everyone is coming. Everyone has something to say and the Internet is a great way to get the word out.

The crisis of journalism and the Internet

This was a very interesting article and it made a lot of points that I was once unaware of. The first of which is the myth that the Internet has caused the collapse of journalism around the world, curtailing a ‘crisis’.

This crisis of journalism according to McChesney is not due to the Internet. It is due to the fact that media conglomerates are on a never-ending quest to find greater profit in a capitalist society, that extreme cutbacks have incurred on both reporters and resources. In fact, the decline of journalism has gone on long before the Internet came into play.

Since such massive cutbacks are going on in the media today, investigative journalism has decline greatly – so instead of investigating the guys on top, the media is now relying on celebrity and scandal news. Seriously… this is the kind of stuff that no one actually cares about.

With the accountants winning over the idealists, the journalism profession is slowly dying. There are more lies seeping into the news from corporate interests, serious political reporting is at a serious decline and international journalism is becoming quite rare. In the 2008 presidential election, a few of the candidates barely got any time with reporters and television networks.

Ron Paul, a Republican candidate that stood for great ideals in favour of the American people, and was against big corporate interest barely got any time on large media networks. Candidates such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain were in the spotlight. Political reporting is more of a regurgitated piece from every network that is less in the best interest of American citizens.

It is sad to see that the journalists who work and strive to tell the truth and work for the general population end up being freelancers or get a job unrelated to their field. It is upsetting that dominant and corporate values are supported in a public service.

McChesney writes that the only way to fix this crisis in journalism is to realize that the Internet is just another avenue to get the news out. The Internet is not something that is out to destroy traditional media. In fact, it is the fault of the need to find greater profit in any measure, than to fund investigative and international journalism.

The only reason why the American media never saw 9/11 coming was because of cutbacks. In order to save money, media owners were closing down their foreign bureaus around the world. Bureaus in Russia, many other countries, and most importantly of all – Afghanistan – were shut down to save money to generate greater profit.

Because of this action taken by media owners, the American media was blind to a terror that still haunts the country. I agree that the Internet is not at fault. Professional journalism is at a decline and there is far too much entertainment news out there. Serious investigative journalism needs to take place, otherwise just like pre-9/11 America, we too will be blind.

If there’s one quote from McChesney that sums up my thoughts about this topic, here it is.

“Citizen journalism and social reformation will flower in a marriage with enhanced professional journalism, not as a replacement for it.” (pg. 65)

Coverage of the G20 proved Twitter’s news edge

The centerpiece of this Toronto Star features article is Twitter, the social networking website that allows anyone to ‘Tweet’ from their cellphone with a maximum of 140-characters, or the same length of the average text message.

The article discusses the impact of Twitter on the G20 protests that occurred in the July just this past year. On a Saturday night after all the television crews and reporters from major news stations packed up and left, the real action began when a group of riot police surrounded peaceful protesters.

Host of TVO’s The Agenda, Steve Paikan was following the crowd of protesters and riot police, while at the same time Tweeting everything that was happening. After a while he was escorted away by police.

Everything that was going on during the G20 protests and everything that was not being reported by the news media was now available to the world in real-time online. Twitter gave access to those interested in what was going on in downtown Toronto, and it also gave power to the protesters to Tweet all the ‘ugliness’ during that weekend.

Twitter was one of the social networks that enlightened people to not assume that it was another format to get their everyday banal thoughts and feelings out there.

Twitter during the G20 protest became a way to deliver and receive news. Journalists such as Steve Paikan, Jesse Hirsh, and others were already doing this. But now even average citizens jumped on the bandwagon and realized Twitter’s potential.

Concordia University anthropology professor Maximilian Forte was interviewed for the Toronto Star article tracked two of his students. One of the students used Twitter and other non-conventional news sources to get his news while the other student relied on conventional news sources such as cable television and print news to learn about the G20.

Forte realized the divide between his students as each of them took a completely opposite side of the other. The student that relied on mainstream news media saw that the protesters were angry anarchists who ‘deserved to have the crap beaten out of them.’

Power of social networking

This is a very objective article in that it describes exactly the power of social networking and how it can change and shape the world in the hands of the iGeneration as named by Joanne Naiman.

Where conventional media only allowed citizens to view local and national in the words of journalists, now citizens are able to wrest that power from conventional news media and make it their own.

Twitter is just another path that the iGeneration is taking to make real-time news accessible and heard around the world, instead of having important voices shut off.

Even after the G20 protests ended, Twitter was still busy with Torontonians Tweeting about the aftermath and the destruction of the power-hungry police.

This power is accessible to just about anyone. Anyone during the protests that had a smart phone and had access to the Internet was able to tell the story from the front-lines, as it happened.  When the mainstream media wasn’t there to report, protesters took it upon themselves to tell the story.

From my personal experience, when I talked to a few people about what was going on during the G20 protest, the majority of them said the protesters deserved what they got. The beatings, the unwarranted arrests – these were ‘deserved.’ But yet, a few others along with myself saw that the situation in Toronto was completely different.

The protesters weren’t ‘anarchists’, they were peacefully fighting for a cause that not many people cared about. These protesters showed the wrongful actions of the government and police dressed in riot gear and the confidence of large numbers.

“The revolution won’t be televised. It may be tweeted.”