Losing Credibility

After reading even the littlest bits of Dan Gilmor’s “We The Media,” it is obvious that he is a fan of citizen journalism. He believes this recent genre of journalism, made possible by advancements in technology, is the start of something very positive. Blogs and citizen reports give people the chance to participate in making the news and the chance to engage in conversations with people who have interests similar to their own. Gilmor says the result will be better reporting, both in terms of the scope of the subject matter covered and the accuracy and completeness of the reports, since people can write about whatever interests them and check what others have written about.

As I previously blogged, I was a bit skeptical about Gilmor’s enthusiasm. So, I decided to check out his claims for myself. Time and time again he refers to his own blog, and talks about how much conversation it has generated and how his readers have enhanced the quality of his work. He expressed thanks to his readers and commentators who have corrected his work on numerous occasions, something Gilmor views as a constructive improvement that mainstream media outlets cannot experience.

Yet, when I read through his blog, I did not find the array of comments and bevy of activity Gilmor led me to believe I would see. In the last month he only got 12 comments and some of them were just his responses to what others said. While I am not trying to belittle his efforts, it was interesting to discover that Gilmor’ blog is not the busy and constant conversation starter I had imagined it to be after reading 173 pages of his book.

The next piece of new media Gilmor thinks is just to good to be true is Ohmy News, a Korean based online newspaper whose motto is "every citizen is a reporter” and most of the articles are written by regular people who want to be heard. Gilmor believes this is the model grassroots efforts because citizens are writing for other citizens, and there is room to email the reporter and post blog like comments on articles in an effort to create a real dialouge.

From my brief perusal of the site, I once again found Gilmor’s praise to be overrated. I looked at a few articles and many of them elicited little to no comments. Again, the amazing dialogue Gilmor promised was missing. And as I delved into a specific article entitled, “Former Russian Prime Minister Poisoned” by Ludwig De Braeckeleer, the site continued to disappoint me. The article was narrowly focused. It spoke about the Prime Ministers death as the Prime Ministers death without mentioning must else. While the death of Gaidar is an important event in its own right, the article failed to put this event in any context or explain the full significance of the occurrence.

MSM coverage on this was totally different. In a New York Times article entitled “Radioactive Trail Is Found in Case of Poisoned Spy,” the death was recorded but in a totally different context. The writers concentrated less on the actual poisoning and instead wrote about how this is a trend, with at least 12 cases of radiation known about. The article gave enough specific about Gaidar's death without focusing only on Gaidar's poisoning.

While Ohmy News gave more detail into the actual poisoning, it could not tell the story as MSM did. Citizen reporters do not necessarily have the breadth of knowledge and resources that journalists have to put events in context and understand them with a wider world perspective. Regarding politics and political events, it is important to know details but it is just as, if not more, important to understand why certain events are crucial in the broader sense and how they impact other world occurrences and the individuals reading about them.