Feature
Constructing Community
Missouri students practice citizen journalism in the Heartland
By Clyde Bentley
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Missouri students Candice Huang (left), Jun Chang and Ronnie Matthew staff a booth at an Earth Day festival, where passers-by were invited to comment on environmental issues or take their own photos for MyMissourian.com.
PHOTO BY CLYDE BENTLEY
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Just a year ago, what we now call “citizen journalism” barely had a name and was more a curiosity among newspaper people than a movement. Now, thanks largely to the popularity of blogs, Craigslist and Korea’s OhMyNews, the phenomenon variously called “citizen,” “open source” or “participatory” journalism is on every media agenda.
For good reason. It offers to turn readers into writers and upset the whole tradition of trained journalists as society’s communication experts. But is it really a threat? Or is it perhaps a return to practices once common to American newspapers?
Those questions launched the Missouri School of Journalism into an intensive practical experiment in citizen journalism a year ago. Trade journal reports on The Bakersfield Californian’s launch of Northwestvoice.com were hot topics on academic discussion lists in spring and summer 2004. At the encouragement of Dean Mills, head of the Missouri School of Journalism, we shifted the emphasis of an existing online journalism class to explore the potential of citizen journalism with a new digital publication.
To the surprise of some academics and the delight of others, what we have found is a huge appetite for the type of journalism we practiced when Walter Williams launched the Missouri School of Journalism in 1908. Back then, the chatty small-town newspaper was the medium of the land. With a separate citizen journalism product, we could provide that personality to our readers without diminishing our traditional daily newspaper or abandoning our Fourth Estate responsibilities.
The very idea of citizen journalism raises big red flags for some journalism scholars. Issues of control, credibility and fact-checking abound. But with the “Mizzou” tradition of practical scholarship, we could not be satisfied just to ponder citizen journalism from afar.
We approached the project as a legitimate business enterprise, with a serious research program running in the background. From the beginning, we focused on concepts that enhanced rather than detracted from traditional newspaper journalism, were quickly transferable to the industry and were cost-efficient enough to be attractive to even small newspapers.
The end product hit the Web on Oct. 1, 2004. MyMissourian.com is a citizen journalism Web site that has proven popular with both readers and industry watchers. But the path to success was neither simple nor quick.
Our first step was to review consumer complaints about our own daily newspaper, the Columbia Missourian, and the newspaper industry in general. We found ample evidence that the public often found us aloof, unresponsive and mired in inexplicable rules and traditions.
A team of graduate students worked through the summer of 2004 translating those complaints into basic concepts that could be approached with simple solutions. Their research eventually came down to a single word: no.
To the public, newspapers are infamous for saying “no.” We have rules about when to submit information. We have rules about format. We will publish an announcement for a 25th wedding anniversary, but not one for a 27th anniversary. No, we can’t run your Little League game results. No, we won’t run pictures of your 10th high school class reunion or that not-so-big fish you caught.
We found that almost all of those “nos” were backed with good arguments, usually traceable to the shortage of space. But space is not a concern online.
Just eliminating “no” did not eliminate all problems. We were especially worried about decency, commercialism, literacy and banality. Again, we turned to what our profession has already learned.
Most newspapers already have checks on profanity. Papers of earlier generations had less defined lines between news and local business promotion, without abandoning journalistic ethics.
And in light of some of the newspaper industry’s own actions, how can we defend journalists’ judgment of what is just plain dumb?
So other than requiring original work from our writers, we settled on just four rules for submission of original material:
- No profanity
- No nudity
- No personal attacks
- No attacks on race, religion, national origin, gender or sexual orientation.
In short, keep it civil. Editors vet each submission before it is published on the public site. We edit for readability and civility, not Associated Press style and newspaper tradition. We let people get passionate. We let people get trivial. And we let people talk about what interests them, not us.
Editors work closely with authors, who “share” information rather than “cover” stories.
No one is anonymous. If we have questions, we get back to the authors by e-mail or phone before publication.
Our first year of “experiment” focused not on developing readership, but on developing “writership.” My students quickly found that giving the public access to the presses did not lead to a deluge of copy. Most people still do not want to be journalists or don’t feel their words are worth repeating. The new role for journalists is to search out people with stories to share and help them get their own words published.
It’s hard work and frustrating to a scribe trained primarily in writing rather than listening. We found, firsthand, how painful it was to let go of the power of the press.
Oh, but it was worth it. We now share stories we would never know about, from the earnest belief of pagans to how to live on Ramen noodles to what it is like to watch your father slowly fade away. We are starting to get a few more political essays, but in general, people just want to talk about the little things in their lives.
Our birthday present to ourselves and our community was a print edition. Like almost all newspapers, the Columbia Missourian gets a big share of its revenue from a free, total market circulation edition. No one is supposed to call it a “shopper,” but it was treated as such – filled with old stories, junk from syndicates, etc.
Now 23,000 homes in Columbia, Mo., get a unique newspaper on their porch each week – one that they get more credit for than we do. And we finally have an economic model for our online operation – the Web produces the copy and the advertisers get their big ads in a wide-circulation broadsheet, just as they like.
For Columbia and journalism in general, it is win-win.
Editor’s note: Newspapers considering “citizen journalism” Web sites are advised to research all of the legalities involved with publishing content from the public well in advance of launching such projects. MyMissourian.com follows four rules of submission, which all make good sense, but mainstream newspapers may want to consider additional safeguards.
Clyde Bentley is an associate professor of convergence journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism. He can be reached at bentleycl@missouri.edu.
