Chicken Little syndrome and snobbery

I spent more time thinking about capital J Journalism last week than I figured I would. When I went to the College Media Conference, I figured we’d mostly hear journalists talking about what kind of stories they’re interested in and how to craft a successful pitch. And there was plenty of this. But there was also plenty of talk about the changing nature of journalism, much of it focused around citizen journalism.

Dan Gillmor spoke about citizen journalism and the fact that some people commit random acts of journalism without ever really meaning to. Two great examples are the London Underground bombing and the Hudson plane crash. Both of these had iconic images taken by cell-phone cameras, and those were pictures a journalist wouldn’t have been able to get. The Hudson photo, in particular, isn’t just good because of what it’s of, it’s a GOOD picture.

But talk to a journalist and you have a better than 50 percent chance of hearing what a crock most citizen journalism is, and how news gathering and writing should be left to the professionals. Sure, some of it is useful, but for the most part, it’s just crap, people pretending to be reporters and not doing a very good job at it. How many of them would do a good job covering a city council?

And that perception is proving hard to change. Sure, some papers use community correspondents and columnists, but they have low expectations for them.

There are plenty of great community-focused blogs out there. Baltimore Crime, a sometimes controversial one, comes to mind. It links to other sites, aggregates content and gives a list of murder victims in Baltimore–always a hot topic in that city. It’s not perfect, and I won’t pretend it is, but it is a private person running a blog about part of life in a community. There are other examples, too, you just need to look.

My somewhat audacious proposal: rather than ghettoizing their contributions as citizen journalism, news organizations need to reach out to them and put their work in the same place as the other journalism. The only people who care about who produced it are the journalists and former journalists who want to protect their craft from what they see as competition.