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COLLECTIVE JOURNALISM
        A THEORY ON THE CHANGING ROLE OF JOURNALISTS AND CITIZENS
                         IN CONTEMPORARY JOURNALISM




December 2007
Master’s Thesis
Wijsbegeerte van een Wetenschapsgebied
Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen
Universiteit van Amsterdam


Boris S. Nihom                                                      Supervisors:
Stud. Nr.: 0039667                                    prof. dr. ing. G.H. de Vries
boris.nihom@student.uva.nl                                     dr. T.M.T. Coolen
FOREWORD
Writing a thesis is not supposed to be easy. If it were, it could never serve its function as a
final proof of scientific ability in a student’s quest towards a degree. So when I started
writing this thesis, I did not cherish the illusion that I was up for an easy task. And although
it was already the second thesis that I wrote, it was still fun. Or at least it was highly
interesting. Participatory journalism proved to be an inspiring, multidisciplinary topic. I
have tried to write a thesis on the crossroads of philosophy and media studies and I believe
I have succeeded in doing so.


However, I could not have done so without the help of some very important people. First I
would like to thank my supervisor Gerard de Vries for his patience, his great help and for all
of his previous lectures that got me interested in the philosophical backgrounds of the
subject in the first place. Second, I would like to thank Bruno Latour, for teaching me his
theory in person during the Spinoza Masterclass in 2005. I feel lucky to have met an
important philosopher, who was in fact still alive at the moment. Third I would like to
thank Maurits Martijn, my partner in crime, for all our interesting discussions about the
subject, our little writers holiday to France and of course our important friendship. Fourth
I would like to thank Jorrit Nuyens, who did more than awesome job being correcting my
use of the English language. Special thanks go out to Dan Gillmor for introducing me to the
subject of citizen journalism. And last but not least I would like to thank my parents for
both my nature and my nurture and especially for still paying my tuition fee.


To all readers, please enjoy this thesis and please participate. In this thesis I will
characterize the publication of any article, journalistic or scientific, as a possible starting
point of a conversation. To adhere to my own rules I have started a weblog at
www.collectivejournalism.org, where this thesis will be posted under a Creative Commons
license, alongside a hyperlinked list of references and the option to comment.


Boris Nihom
December 2007
ABSTRACT
This thesis deals with the changing roles of two main actors in contemporary journalism,
namely The Journalist and The Audience. This change is fuelled by the evolution of the
Internet into a truly easily writable mass medium, caused by a set of recent technological
innovations often called Web 2.0. The main effect of Web 2.0’s emergence is that the
monopoly of the traditional mass media institutions on the creation and diffusion of
information is slowly starting to fall apart. Nowadays, everyone with access to the Internet
can share whatever he or she finds relevant, important, or just interesting, with the rest of
the world.


Journalism that involves citizens, layman and amateurs is usually called citizen journalism
or participatory journalism. The fast growth of this phenomenon in the last five years has
been the subject of many publications from scholars in journalism and media theory as
well as articles from professional journalists and bloggers. In these articles, the advantages
and disadvantages of citizen involvement are usually highlighted. I believe however, that
the emergence of new forms of journalism causes more fundamental conceptual tensions
about the way good journalism is perceived. These are the tensions between objectivity
and authenticity, between authority and transparency, and between information and
conversation.


In this thesis I will characterize the changing relationship between journalists and citizens,
and solve some of the conceptual tensions that are involved. I will do so by drawing on the
work of the French philosopher Bruno Latour, and by employing the methods and
conceptual framework that he used in his work on the philosophy of science. Based on his
theory of science-in-action, I will argue for and define a theory of collective journalism
that can give us insight into a new journalistic arrangement, which involves both citizens
and professional journalists. Collective journalism is defined as fact-building storytelling
aimed at all members of a society, which is authentic, transparent, and the reflection
of a conversation that society has with itself; a conversation of which the publication
of any single journalistic article can be a starting point, but should never be its
definitive end.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.    INTRODUCTION                                             5


2.    THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND WEB 2.0                            9

2.1   SHARING INFORMATION                                      9

2.2   PUBLISHING INFORMATION                                  10

2.3   FINDING INFORMATION                                     12

2.4   USING MULTIMEDIA                                        14


3.    CITIZEN PARTICIPATION IN JOURNALISM                     16

3.1   WHAT IS JOURNALISM?                                     16

3.2   CREATING NEWS                                           19

3.2.1 CITIZENS AS EARS AND EYES OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS   20

3.2.2 CITIZENS AS MICRO JOURNALISTS                           21

3.2.3 CITIZENS PROVIDING AN ALTERNATIVE VOICE                 24

3.2.4 CONCEPTUAL TENSIONS: OBJECTIVITY AND AUTHENTICITY       25

3.3   SELECTING NEWS                                          26

3.3.1 THE WISDOM OF CROWDS                                    27

3.3.2 THE ROLE OF INDIVIDUAL EXPERTS                          29

3.3.3 CONCEPTUAL TENSIONS: AUTHORITY AND TRANSPARENCY         30

3.4   COMMENTING ON THE NEWS                                  30

3.4.1 JOURNALISM AS A CONVERSATION                            31

3.4.2 CONCEPTUAL TENSIONS: INFORMATION AND CONVERSATION       32


4.    JOURNALISM IN ACTION                                    33

4.1   LATOUR’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE                          33

4.2   FROM SCIENCE TO JOURNALISM                              37
5.    SETTLING JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES                         39

5.1   JOURNALISM AS SETTLING JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES           39

5.1.1 WHAT ARE JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES?                        40

5.1.2 CITIZENS AS ALLIES IN SETTLING JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES   42

5.1.3 CITIZENS REOPENING JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES               43

5.2   TRANSLATING THE NEWS                                        45

5.2.1 TRANSLATION VERSUS DIFFUSION                                46

5.2.2 APPLYING THE MODEL OF TRANSLATION TO JOURNALISM             47

5.2.3 NEW WAYS OF LOOKING AT COMMENTING                           51

5.3   THE PROOF OF THE FACT IS IN THE COLLECTIVE                  52

5.3.1 THE COLLECTIVE SETTLEMENT OF CONTROVERSIES                  53

5.3.2 JOURNALISM AND TRUTH                                        55

5.3.3 JOURNALISM AS A COLLECTIVE EFFORT                           56

5.3.4 USING HYPERLINKS TO MEASURE HE STRENGTH OF COLLECTIVES      57


6.    A THEORY OF COLLECTIVE JOURNALISM                           61

6.1   SOLVING THE CONCEPTUAL TENSIONS                             61

6.1.1 OBJECTIVITY VERSUS AUTHENTICITY                             61

6.1.2 AUTHORITY VERSUS TRANSPARENCY                               63

6.1.3 INFORMATION VERSUS CONVERSATION                             65

6.2   REDEFINING GOOD JOURNALISM                                  67

6.3   REDEFINING THE JOURNALIST                                   68

6.4   DEFINING COLLECTIVE JOURNALISM                              69


BIBLIOGRAPHY                                                      72
1.      INTRODUCTION
In 1990, when Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML, the programming language that forms the
base for hypertextual web pages, one could still argue that the Internet was just an
evolutionary step in the history of mass media. When Mosaic, the first graphic web-browser
available to the public, was released in 1993, the same could be argued. When Google
created what now seems to be the definitive search engine, it seemed a logical
development for the Internet as we knew it. Also, the recent uprising of weblogs and
multimedia content could lead a lay observer to think that the Internet is just progressing
in its natural direction and that people are finally finding ways to use it to the fullest.


However, looking back at the total development of mass media in the last century, one
finds a major turning point around the year 2000. Not only has the turn of the millennium
brought us the phantom threat of the millennium bug, a single currency in the European
union and a series of terrorist attacks that would radically alter the geopolitical situation. It
has also brought us the first mass medium that is easily writable, the Internet, in a new
form that people have recently started calling Web 2.0.


The traditional mass media were essentially either one-to-one, or one-to-many. The phone,
the fax and, to a lesser extent, the telegraph were available to all, but had a limited reach.
One could only reach a single other person. The printing press, radio, television and
cinema were all one-to-many, but were only in the hands of a small group of people; the
traditional mass media institutions. Essentially, they were all push media. But with the
Internet, and specifically Web 2.0, we now have a genuine many-to-many pull medium (or
one-to-many, few-to-many or few-to-few, whatever is required by the specific type of
content). And it is not going anywhere anytime soon. In the words of Tim Berners-Lee, from
an interview with the Dutch newspaper Het Parool: “The chances that the World Wide Web
would collapse, were enormously large. That is what happens to most innovations: they come
and go. Really, it would have taken just a little effort to make it fail. A company, a government,
the scientific world, anyone could have stopped the Web. But we passed that point.

Nowadays, no-one can turn the Web off anymore” 1.




1 Hendrickx 2007 (translation by the author)


                                                                                                5
The main effect of Web 2.0’s emergence is that the monopoly of the traditional mass media
institutions on the creation and diffusion of information is slowly starting to fall apart. The
lines between producers and consumers of information have started to blur. Dan Gillmor,
the influential technology journalist and founder of the Center for Citizen Media, coined
the phrase “the former audience” in his book “We, The Media”2 . While in the traditional
view the audience used to be a controllable, passive entity that needed to be fed with
information, they are now not only selecting their own information but also becoming
part of the process of creating and disseminating information. The word ‘information’
should be read in its broadest sense here: entertainment, science, journalism, the
innovation of new technologies and the physical production of (information based) goods.


It is important to note that this transition cannot simply be traced back to the rise of the
Internet in the mid-90’s, or the rise of the personal computer in the mid-80’s. Of course
these developments formed the foundation on which this new read/write medium could
be built. However, it is mostly due to new technologies that emerged in the past five years,
that it has become possible for every person with a connection to the Internet to publish
its own share of information. Before that, the Internet and specifically the World Wide Web
was of course a medium that linked an unprecedented amount of information, but it still
took a specific set of tools and skills to be able to contribute to this. Nowadays,
contributing is an option that is open to virtually everyone.


The effects of this media revolution are visible in all types of information, which were
previously exclusive to the big institutions of the mass media. However most of its
consequences can be seen in entertainment and journalism. People have started
publishing their own movies on Youtube and their own photo’s on Flick’r, they host their
own virtual game shows in World of Warcraft, promote their own music on Myspace, and
direct their own real life soap opera’s on their weblog, some of which can be seen as a
voluntary reduction of privacy that goes far beyond the point Big Brother critics have
always been afraid of. Journalism today is characterized by an immense growth of the
amount and openness of information available to the public, and by an increase in the
possibility for citizens to create and publish their own journalistic content. In many



2 Gillmor 2004: xxv


                                                                                             6
instances, journalists used to be the ones who literally mediated the relationship between
‘the public’ and ‘the world out there’. Nowadays, the public has ways to cut out the
middlemen and, as a consequence, has become ever more critical to the functioning of
Journalism itself. We witness, in the words of Dan Gillmor, “Journalism’s transformation
from a twentieth century mass media structure to something profoundly more grassroots and
democratic” 3.


This thesis focuses on journalism. More specifically, it focuses on the changing role of the
two main actors in the journalistic arena, namely The Journalist and The Audience. Both
parties nowadays seem to be facing important questions about their mutual involvement.
There has always seemed to be a clear division of labor between the two: journalist make
news, citizens consume news. The news simply was out there and readers either bought it
or did not. The rise of the writable Internet shows at least that this separation is no longer
in effect and that now, theoretically, everyone with a piece of information that he or she
finds relevant, important, or just interesting, can share it with the rest of the world. At
most, it might show that the strict separation between journalists and citizens, between
the media institutions and the audience, between the production and the consumption of
news has always been an illusion, doomed to be unveiled. In either case we are witnessing
the rise of citizen journalism, sometimes called participatory journalism, in which both
professional journalists and citizens, or amateur journalists, each play their role.


Marc Chavannes, professor of Journalism at the University of Groningen, expressed his view
on this changing role pattern as follows: “Within a few years, the big-media have lost their
collective monopoly on uncovering news. The 8 o’clock news is a national family moment
that a lot of people would rather loose, but he who does is not hopelessly uninformed. The
news is everywhere”4. In another article he commented on the changing role of professional
journalists: “In my ideal world, the journalist is a moderator who guides current events,
elaborates on them en provides them with context, together with serious citizens who feel
taken seriously” 5.




3 Ibdem p. xxiii
4 Chavannes 2007: 1 (translation by the author)
5 Termeer 2007: 5 (translation by the author)


                                                                                            7
In the remaining of this thesis, I will dive deeply into the contemporary relationship
between journalists and citizens. By drawing on the work of the French philosopher Bruno
Latour, and by employing the methods and conceptual framework that he used in his work
on the philosophy of science, I will characterize this relationship and solve some of the
conceptual tensions that are involved. Finally I will argue for and define a theory of
collective journalism that can give us insight into a new journalistic arrangement, which
involves both citizens and professional journalists. By using this theory it is possible to
differentiate between good and bad journalism, regardless of the formal job description of
the people and things initially involved in the news making process.


For now, it is important to describe in more detail the different manifestations of this new
kind of journalism that is made possible by the emergence of web 2.0. First, in chapter 2, I
will describe some of the technologies that made it all workable in the first place. This is
necessary, in my view, to gain complete understanding of the differences between Web
1.0 and Web 2.0, which have fundamentally changed the way in which people can use the
Internet. Then, in chapter 3, I will describe some of the ways in which both professional
journalists and citizens are using these technologies for the production, selection and
consumption of news and the conceptual tensions that this has as its result.


In chapter 4 I will explain Bruno Latour’s theory in detail. From his theory I will derive a
method (looking at journalism ‘in action’) and three main concepts (controversy, translation
and collective). These method and concepts will be used to characterize contemporary
journalism in chapter 5. In chapter 6, the concluding chapter of this thesis, I will solve the
conceptual tensions mentioned in chapter 3 by redefining the tensions in terms of the
journalistic adaptation of Latour’s theory. I will argue why a theory of collective journalism
is better suited to the issues of our time than a theory of citizen or participatory
journalism, while staying true to the original values of journalism in general.




                                                                                            8
2.      THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND WEB 2.0
The emergence of a writable web did not just happen from one day to the next. People
have always been able to share information through the Internet. The widespread use of e-
mail is the most prominent example of this, but mailing lists and newsgroups were also
around from the earliest days of the Internet, even before the web became graphic. These
were mostly one-to-few applications though, in which a certain person shared his
information with a designated group of people. These people got the information pushed
to them instead of being able to pull it of the web whenever they wanted to.


What is new about the toolkit, which carries the name of Web 2.0, is that it enables people
to publish information, and not just share it. Also, it enables people to find relevant
information fast and thorough, instead of waiting for it to be pushed to them while they
can do nothing but hope it is relevant. Furthermore, it enables the use of moving images,
photo’s and audio to enhance the information value.


In this chapter I will describe the aforementioned tools for sharing information in more
detail. This will be followed by a description of the new tools that enable the publishing
and finding of relevant information, and the production of multimedia content.


2.1     SHARING INFORMATION
The act of sharing information was the basic purpose for which the Internet was designed.
Initially, this meant scientific or military information, but as soon as the public gained
access, e-mail was one of the first features of the Internet, which immediately proved to be
quite useful. The ability to send a pretty large amount of textual information to any other
person in the world at virtually no costs (except for, of course, the money paid to gain
access in the first place) was a giant leap forward for scientists, business people and
journalists, but also for grandparents, (future) lovers and lost friends.


It didn’t take long before people started to realize that if you can send out e-mail to a
single other person, you can also send it out to a group of other persons. And so, the first
mailing lists emerged. For example, Dave Farber, a telecommunications professor at the
University of Pennsylvania, already had a mailing list called “Interesting People” in the
mid-80’s. If he saw something that he found interesting, he would pass it on. He did not find


                                                                                           9
the information himself. Correspondents he knew mostly sent it to him, or he would just
read it in the newspaper. However, it was he who selected what was interesting or
important. As he said himself: “I consider myself an editor in the real sense. This is a funny
form of new newspaper, where the Net is sort of my wire service. My job is to decide what goes
out and what doesn’t”6 . Nowadays, Dave Farber is far from alone in his mailing list operation.
There are no exact figures on how many mailing lists there are out there. All I know is that I
am subscribed to at least twelve, write one myself and that I am not the only one doing so.


In the early days of the Internet, there was a specific popular protocol for a service similar
to mailing lists. This protocol is called Usenet and instead of ‘mailing lists’ people used the
term ‘newsgroups’. The big difference with mailing lists is, that it is not up to the sender to
decide who can apply. Anyone can subscribe himself to a newsgroup and receive all the
postings that are sent to this newsgroup. Sending is done simply by sending an e-mail to a
central mailing address from which the text would be distributed to all subscribers. At the
heydays of Usenet there were thousands of newsgroups, covering every subject one could
think of, including most things considered illegal or immoral.


Nowadays, Usenet is not as popular as it used to be. Not because its specific use is not
considered valuable anymore, but merely because there is an easier method to achieve
the same result, which is the use of forums. These are basically newsgroups that work via
the Web instead of via e-mail. The main advantage is that now all the benefits of the Web
can be used; from sharing multimedia content and using hyperlinks, to using advanced
technology like cookies (little hidden programs that remember a user’s preferences).


2.2      PUBLISHING INFORMATION
Sharing information with a predefined, relatively small group of ‘known’ people is one
thing, but publishing information to the public at large is quite another. The technical
ability to do so is one of the main characteristics of Web 2.0. It truly happens and is widely
supported by the Internet community. We will look into some specific manifestations of
Web 2.0, focused on journalism, in the next chapter. For now, let’s focus on the
technologies that make this all possible.



6 In: Gillmor 2004: 19


                                                                                            10
The main obstacle the Internet had to overcome before becoming writable was the fact
that building a website was fairly hard. One either had to learn HTML or difficult website
authoring software such as Adobe GoLive or Flash, which were mostly aimed at the
professional design industry. This changed with the invention of two different types of
technologies that separated content from appearance: Cascaded Style Sheets (CSS) and
Content Management Systems (CMS). It is beyond the scope of this thesis to go into detail
on either of these technologies. But simply put, it works like this: the programming code
that determines the looks of a website is made by a professional designer and is saved into
a CSS that applies to all future information that will be put on the website. Through a CMS
every individual user has the ability to upload their content, which will be automatically
shaped into the predefined style of the website in general.


Using these technologies, it was now possible for companies to start building ‘empty’
websites, which could later be filled by its users. The prime example of this is the weblog.
The weblog (or ‘blog’), is usually built on the basis of a weblog-publishing site like Blogger,
Wordpress, or the Dutch blog publisher Blogo.nl. These sites provide their users with a
nicely designed weblog framework and easy software to fill it with content.


Today, there are blogs on every thinkable subject. According to weblog search engine
Technorati, there were 70 million weblogs in April 2007 7 . Blogs can be really personal and
deal with a person’s private life or a specific undertaking, like a long journey to a remote
country. On the other side of the spectrum, blogs can be about specific technologies,
politics, or a specific domain in science. Somewhere in between, blogs can be about the
author’s view on the world around him or her, and can be written in a more or less
journalistic fashion. Some people consider the blog to be a specific genre. I think they are
right for as far as the highly personal, diary-like blogs are concerned. For disseminating
scientific or journalistic content however, it is just a technology for publication. All that
defines weblogs is that they are “online journals, comprised of links and postings in reverse
chronological order”8 . These postings are usually short and frequently updated. They can
contain text, images, video or just a collection of hyperlinks to other web pages. On some



7 Sifry 2007
8 Gillmor 2004: 29


                                                                                            11
blogs only a specified person is authorized to post, while others give people the option to
comment. And then there are some blogs, like the famous tech-blog Slashdot.org, that are
entirely written by their virtual community.


Another famous example of a website that thrives on content provided by its community is
Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Wikipedia is based on the technology of wiki’s,
invented by Ward Cunningham in de late 1990’s. A wiki can be defined as: “a server program
that allows users to collaborate in forming the content of a website. With a wiki, users can edit
the site content, including other users’ contributions, using a regular web browser”9 .


Wikipedia started in English on Januari 15, 2001 as an open-source, free encyclopedia. As of
November 2006, there are Wikipedias in 174 different languages that have more than 100
articles, 51 of which have over 10,000 articles, and 17 of which have over 50,000 articles.
Following the English language Wikipedia, one of the top-10 most visited websites on the
Internet, the German, French, Polish, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish,
Spanish, Russian and Finnish editions have over 100,000 articles each. The company behind
Wikipedia, called Wikimedia also initiated side projects like Wikibooks, Wikinews,
Wikiquote and the Wiktionary. Others have taken up the concept and put it to their own
use, like the open-source travel guide Wikitravel. Also, the wiki technology is being used
more and more by companies and other private institutions to serve as an internal
knowledge database 10 .


2.3     FINDING INFORMATION
Needless to say, it is necessary for a medium, through which so much information is so
easily published, to be highly searchable. What do you need massive amounts of
information for, if you cannot find what you need? Search technology has therefore been a
huge business ever since the Internet has become available to the public.


There is a big difference however, between the search technologies from the past and the
search technologies from the present and, presumably, the future. Past technologies could



9 Jennings 2006
10 Wikipedia 2007


                                                                                              12
be rightfully labeled search technologies: they helped a user searching for some specific
information, which he himself found relevant. In contrast, modern search technology
behaves more like find technologies. The network itself aggregates all available
information and finds whatever it thinks is relevant for a certain user, based on search
entries of varying specificity. Sometimes, these technologies are therefore also called
aggregation engines. Since the rise of these find-technologies, it is no longer a matter of
being found, but one of being found relevant.


The first search engines, like Yahoo and Altavista, were simple. When given a query, they
compared the search terms to all the web pages in their database. Then they ranked the
pages according to their overlap with the search word or sentence. But in 1995, two
Stanford Univiersity students developed a new kind of search engine: Google.


Google radically changed the way search engines work. Using their own algorithm called
PageRank, Page and Brin developed a search engine that not only searches for overlap
between a search query and a web page, but also estimates the relevance of a page based
on it’s popularity. As is written on their own website: “PageRank relies on the uniquely
democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual
page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A,
for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a
page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages
that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.
Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance” 11 .


It is vital for the rest of this thesis, to understand the implications of PageRank: it
empowers people to influence the likelihood that any given piece of information online
will be found as a result of a search query, by linking to this piece of information from their
own website, blog or other web-based medium. So keep this in mind when you are
searching something on Google: an anonymous mob and an equally anonymous algorithm
are helping you and those with equal search terms decide what to find relevant.




11 Google 2007


                                                                                               13
There is another example of a find technology, that works just like this: RSS. This
technology makes it possible to add a multitude of tags to a piece of information, like a
blog posting or an article published online. For example, this thesis could have been
tagged ‘thesis’, ‘journalism’, ‘web 2.0’, ‘Internet’, ‘philosophy’, etc. Readers can then
download an RSS reader, and subscribe to any number of weblogs or other pages with a so-
called RSS feed. By telling the RSS reader which tags you are interested in, the reader
automatically refreshes at a certain interval, showing you all new postings that carry the
specified tags. So depending on which tags you tell the program you find interesting, the
program aggregates all information and decides which parts are relevant.


A last type of find engines contains those engines that are not based on an algorithm at all,
but strictly on the social capacities of the Internet. Del.icio.us is, for example, a website
which enables people to store their bookmarks online. Based on a comparison between
your bookmarks and those of all the other people on Del.icio.us, the website recommends
other sites to you that you will probably be interested in. Using the same principle, the
online store Amazon.com was the first store to inform customers with the buying behavior
of potential like minds. This is a function now seen as a key advantage of online stores over
their real world counterparts. Last.fm does the same for webradio, based on the music
playlist on your computer. Further, there are technologies like Digg and eKudos, which
provide readers with a way to rate blog-postings, so the program can decide whether or
not to recommend a certain posting to someone.


In short, people have more power to influence what other people will find when they are
searching, since the emergence of Web 2.0. So because of Web 2.0, people have more
power to influence what is found relevant and what makes it to the political, social or
journalistic agenda. Meanwhile, the guys at Google are on a quest to map all the
information in the world based on these principles.


2.4     USING MULTIMEDIA
A last feature of Web 2.0 is based on two developments that mutually enhance each other:
broadband and compression. While the Internet keeps getting faster and faster, diverse
companies come up with solutions to compress huge amounts of data, especially images,
audio and video. Also, at the same time, digital (video) cameras keep getting smaller,


                                                                                          14
cheaper and better, as do the cameras on mobile phones. Consequently, the web is
becoming writable not only in a textual, but also in an audiovisual way, which previously
seemed to be exclusive to the traditional mass media.


Consumers of information used to see most of the world through the eyes of the mass
media. Now, there is an army of reporters out there on the street that can capture and
publish whichever image they like. With the push of a button people can show you their
boy- or girlfriend, their pet, how well they can dance, sing or play the piano, what their
house looks like, or – regardless of the subject – how good a photographer or filmmaker
they consider themselves to be. Websites like Youtube (for video), Flickr (for foto’s) and
Myspace (used widely for music), are filled up every single day with incredible amounts of
so called user generated content.


By far the largest part of this information is personal content, or entertainment based
content. However, the modern multimedia toolkit also gave us world famous images of the
9/11 terrorist attacks, the London city metro bombings, the New Orleans flooding and the
2004 Tsunami. This gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘eye witness’. Questions about
how many people actually take part in this phenomenon are interesting, but are not of
major importance in the scope of this these. For a conceptual understanding of the
developments that are taking place, one just has to look at the options for participation
these technologies create.


Since new methods of sharing, publishing and finding information are combined with
modern multimedia technologies, we see a whole new media landscape arising. Web 2.0
forms the basis for a new window through which we see the world. No longer is the scope
of our worldview limited by the subjective or agenda-driven determination of relevance,
made by a select group of experts, journalists, reporters, editors, filmmakers or writers. We
ourselves have the tools in hands to publish and select the facts and opinions that shape
our view of the world, spread those facts and opinions and comment on the view of others.
The next chapter will be dedicated to how this new media landscape has changed the
journalistic practice. I will describe several ways in which citizens are using their
newfound ability to create, select and comment on journalistic information.




                                                                                          15
3.      CITIZEN PARTICIPATION IN JOURNALISM
In the previous chapter, I described some of the most influential technologies behind Web
2.0 and the new participatory journalism movement. That is, however, not enough to fully
encompass the changes brought about by this development. In analyzing journalism, one
should not only focus on the technologies behind journalism and the changing media
channels through which information flows. In addition, one should look at how these
technologies are used and what it is that journalists, professional or amateur, do. So before
turning on my philosophical flashlight to shine some light on the conceptual
characteristics of participatory journalism, I should first take a walk through the new
landscape in which these concepts have become relevant.


I will describe the new journalistic landscape and specifically focus on the role of the
traditional journalist and the former audience in more ‘human’ and practical terms instead
of the technological terms than were used in the previous chapter. First, I will take a short
look at the definition of journalism, to see what can be analyzed as such and what cannot.
Then I will look at the three levels on which citizens engage in journalism. I will conclude
each of these three paragraphs with some broader observations on the differences
between old en new journalism, the concepts involved and the tensions between them.
Solving these conceptual tensions will be the primary goal of my analysis in the second
part of this thesis. It is important to note that the separation of journalism into three
different levels is only for the purpose of conceptualization. In the real world, and in the
model presented in the next chapter of this thesis, these three levels are mixed up and
sometimes even indistinguishable.


3.1     WHAT IS JOURNALISM?
The main problem one encounters when trying to find a definition of journalism is that
more than often journalists themselves use a fairly tautological description of their work.
To them, journalism is ‘what journalists do’ or “whatever people generally recognized as
journalists do whenever they say they are doing their jobs”12 . The problem with this
definition is that it provides no boundaries as to who can be counted as journalist and who
cannot. They are neither inclusive nor exclusive in nature so they are useless when



12 Van Eick 2005. In Dasselaar 2006: 42


                                                                                          16
analyzing journalism practiced by people whose identity as journalists is at stake in the
first place. And not only do these definitions fail to tell us who is a journalist and who is not,
their focus on recognition makes it unnecessarily complicated to use them in multiple
social environments, each with their own implicit standards of recognition. Can ‘corporate
journalists’ be considered journalists? Are ‘citizen journalists’ recognized as journalists? To
some they are, to others they are not. This incongruence of the definition is at the heart of
the matter.


Another possible route to defining journalism, is to look at journalism as an occupation
which serves a certain goal or set of goals. In 2001, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel
published a book called “The Elements of Journalism” in which they define journalism on
the basis of nine elements:


     1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth
     2. Its first loyalty is to citizens
     3. Its essence is a discipline of verification
     4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover
     5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power
     6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise
     7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant
     8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional
     9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.


These elements combined ultimately lead to their definition: “The primary purpose of
journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self governing”13 .


Journalism can also be defined as a description of what journalists do: “The profession of
gathering, editing and publishing news reports and related articles for newspapers,
magazines, television, or radio” 14 . Dutch researchers Van Eick15 and Deuze 16 also take this


13 Kovach & Rosenstiel 2001: 17
14 The Encarta World English Dictionary 2007
15 Van Eick 2005
16 Deuze 2005


                                                                                                 17
route albeit in a much more abstract way. Both conclude that the heart of journalism lies in
storytelling. The ability to turn a simple state of affairs into a narrative, is what separates
journalism from the mere reporting of facts, as happens for example in an encyclopedia.
Elements number 7 and 8 from Kovach and Rosenstiel’s description can be said to describe
this part of the process of storytelling. It is this competence of professional journalists that
is widely used to argue against the involvement of citizens. They are believed not to
posses this competence, due to a lack of professional education or talent.


In the next chapter I will argue on philosophical grounds that there is also another
possible way of defining storytelling, which is different from the task of writing nice stories
and turning simple events into narratives with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In this
definition, storytelling is comparable with showing that ones interpretation of relevant
events is the right one and the capacity of turning simple facts into a comprehensible
narrative is one of the resources which can be used in doing so. And since I, along with
Kovach & Rosenstiel, defined the goals of journalism as “providing citizens with the
information they need to be free and self-governing” and since “a journalists first
obligation is to the truth”, I believe a journalist should and will always try to show why his
interpretation of relevant events is right. That is why I argue that storytelling is the
essence of journalism, contributing to all 9 elements, and can therefore function as a
demarcation criterion between good and bad journalism, but not a priori between
citizens and journalists.


Combining all the aforementioned methods and definitions, Arjan Dasselaar arrives at the
following definition in his influential empirical investigation into the world of webloggers,
“The Fifth Estate; On the journalistic aspects of the Dutch blogosphere”: “Journalism is truth
seeking storytelling aimed at citizens, which is editorially independent”17 . His definition is
very open: it can include both professional and nonprofessional journalists and what is
regarded ‘news’ can vary, as long as it seeks a truthful reporting and explanation of events
and is editorially independent. It is this definition of journalism that I will use in the
remaining parts of my thesis and which can also serve as the basis for a definition of
collective journalism.



17 Dasselaar 2006: 47


                                                                                             18
In the following three paragraphs I will describe the role of citizens in the (online)
journalistic process, based on this definition and some of the elements of journalism as
defined by Kovach and Rosenstiel. I will look concretely at how citizens are involved on
three different levels: creating news, selecting news and commenting on the news.


3.2     CREATING NEWS
The most commonly known form of participatory journalism, or citizen journalism, is the
one where citizens actively participate in creating the news. This is essentially not a new
development. If we go back in time a little, we find examples of pirate radio, fanzines and
amateur ‘newspapers’ made with a typewriter, glue, a pair of scissors and an old copier.
However, since Web 2.0 made mass-diffusion of information possible, people have started
to use their ability to engage more and more.


According to Gillmor, the population of news-creating citizens consists of two types of
people. First are the people who have been practicing some form of participatory
journalism, in their own way, before the read/write web became available. These people
are the ones who used to write letters to the editor, made small, local, and often critical
amateur magazines or made the amateur fanzines and newspapers mentioned above. They
are the people that could and can be found in for example underground music scenes or
political activist movements. Second is the former audience: people who used to be
passive consumers of the news, but who are now becoming a source of information for
other citizens and for professional journalists18 . Members of the former audience have
different motives for engaging in journalism, ranging from the simple technical possibility
(as described in chapter 2) to the satisfaction of certain needs. Bowmann and Willis
describe some of these needs, including the will to be heard, the will to connect with
others who have similar interests, the will to gain status in a given community and the will
to inform others on a specific field in which one is an expert 19 .




18 Gillmor 2004
19 Bowmann & Willis 2006: 47


                                                                                         19
According to Gillmor: “The issues of our time are too complex, too nuanced, for the major
media to cover properly, given the economic realties of modern corporate journalism” 20 . I will
now describe a number of reasons in which citizen journalists have proven to be useful to
professional journalists and provide an example for each one.


3.2.1   CITIZENS AS EARS AND EYES OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS
The most commonly known form of citizen journalism is highly based on multimedia
technology. It is a form in which citizens are not really ‘doing journalism’, but are merely
acting as a source for professional journalists, providing photos, videos and audio
recordings to the press. Whether the content is provided directly to the press or mediated
by websites such as Youtube, Flick’r or the specialized Dutch news website Skoeps.nl (which
claims to have “16 million reporters”, equaling the number of citizens in The Netherlands),
the point is that there are far more citizens with a camera (or mobile phone) than there
are professional reporters. Another advantage is the considerable shortening of
journalistic response-time. While it may take some time for professional reporters to come
to the scene, there will always be some people ready on the spot to record the events.


This is not a completely new development though. People would not have seen the
assassination of John F. Kennedy if it were not for a citizen with a camera. People wouldn’t
have seen, let alone have rioted over the Rodney King beatings if it were not for a citizen
capturing what happened. These events, where the audience got to feel present at, used
to be exceptions to the rule. Most of what happened in the world that was not covered by
the traditional press, stayed in the dark. However, since the dispersal of the digital camera
and the camera-equipped mobile phone, having a witness on the spot is the rule. Also in
the past, journalists found out much of what they knew from people who told them things.
But nowadays, people do not have to find a journalist first who finds the time to listen.
Whether the press responds or not, people can always publish the material themselves.
And while of course the traditional mass media are still the best option to go for if you
want to reach a large audience, the competition is fierce. We cannot neglect the one
billion mobile phones sold in 2006 alone 21 and the possibilities they bring along.



20 Gillmor 2004: 103
21 Palmer 2006


                                                                                             20
As obvious and ubiquitous as is it, this is still a fairly controversial form of participatory
journalism. Why? Because most ‘traditional’ journalists, when asked their opinion about
citizen journalism, point out this feature and argue that citizens should not pretend to be
journalists, when they are merely its eyes and ears. Famous Dutch new media journalist
Francisco van Jole, who is also a rigorous citizen journalism critic, made this point on
several occasions. In the next chapter, we will see that a philosophical misunderstanding is
causing this skepticism. Having people to serve as their eyes and ears is not a mere task at
all, but an essential property of the way in which journalists enable themselves to achieve
their goals in the first place. Trying to keep up a strict division between journalists on one
hand and society on the other causes more problems than that it solves.


3.2.2    CITIZENS AS MICRO JOURNALISTS
Marshall McLuhan once said: "For any problem, there is a person or persons in a large
population of educated people that doesn't see it as a problem"22 . For journalism this could
be paraphrased as: “For every event, there is someone who has more knowledge or a
stronger opinion about it than others”. This person might be willing to cover the event and
turn it into a news story. This is the key aspect of the next form of citizen news production I
want to discuss and that I will call micro journalism or micropublishing. Instead of citizens
acting as sources or supplying content to journalists, we are now talking about citizens
taking up some or all of the tasks of professional journalists and publishing their own
content on their own website or on some sort of institutionalized participatory journalism
endeavor. These usually take the form of a weblog, because it is by far the easiest way to do
so by far. Keep in mind though, that the weblog is just a technology and not per se a genre
or medium in itself.


The principle behind micro-journalism is called ‘The Long Tail’, a term coined by Chris
Anderson, editor-in-chief of the influential technology magazine Wired23 . Part of his
theory is this: on the Internet, the storage of large amounts of information is unlimited in
its capacity and theoretically costless. The relative costs of an extra unit of information are
consequently nil, in contrary to goods in the real world. That’s why it becomes interesting



22 In: Gillmor 2004: 108
23 Anderson 2006


                                                                                            21
for media organizations, and affordable to citizen-owned initiatives, to cater to a large
amount of small audiences instead of a small amount of large audiences. Of course there
aren’t enough journalists to cover all the events that all small audiences find interesting,
but it is possible to cater to as much small audiences as there are people with journalistic
aspirations. Considering then the fact that more than one billion people are online
today24 , for every event there is indeed a high chance that there is a person willing to
cover it. This creates the opportunity for highly localized and highly specialist or expert-
based journalism.


A famous example of highly localized news is the free online and offline newspaper
Bluffton Today, in a rapidly growing city in the state of South Carolina. The newspaper has a
circulation of about 17.000 and the website blufftontoday.com is visited 36 times each
month per household25 . All content, both on the website and in the printed version, is
supplied by the over 2000 registered users, some of whom are professional journalists, but
most are just members of the community. Another example is the Melrose Mirror, an online
publication in Melrose, Massachusetts. It was founded by MIT’s News-In-The-Future
Consortium and is being edited by a group of senior citizens who do so out of love for the
community. Outside of the United States, big national newspapers like the French Le
Monde or local Dutch newspaper Twentsche Courant Turbantia and local television station
RTV Utrecht have (parts of) their online counterpart dedicated to local news and edited by
local citizens.


Another common form of micropublishing is the expert blog. These are blogs, covering
news from a certain area of expertise. This type of blogs is most popular within the ICT
(macworld.com), technology (bright.nl) and marketing (adage.com) communities, not in
the last place because the people in these fields were early adapters of the Internet
phenomenon itself. However, also in other fields like cars (autoblog.com) or audio
equipment (gearslutz.com), the number of expert blogs and forums is growing very rapidly.




24 See http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
25 Blanken & Deuze 2007: 92


                                                                                          22
The last form of micro journalism is aimed at the grassroots. Advocates from a specific area
of the political spectrum can have their own online publications, like the Belgian
progressive liberal website www.liberales.be or the Dutch neo-conservative website
www.conservatismeweb.com. Finally, websites can be devoted to covering all the ins and
outs of particular social issues, like climate change (realclimate.org).


This development creates tremendous options for traditional mass media organizations
and professional journalists in both their online and offline activities. They can collect the
best news items from these alternative sources and cover them. In their article “The power
and politics of blogs”, Drezner and Farrell show that this is exactly what happens and this
‘trickle-up’ effect is what made some notorious webloggers into professional journalists or
even celebrities, like the now world famous blogger Instapundit. Even if the name of the
original blogger stays unknown, traditional media organizations are building more often
on stories that citizens first brought under their attention26 .


There is a lot of skepticism towards these amateur news sites and weblogs. Traditional
journalists do not acknowledge most of them. They suspect them of being focused too
much on the private life and subjective views of the author and not following the rules and
goals of journalism. As some journalist said, in a study by Marci McCoy Roth from 2004: “[the
blogosphere is] people incessantly spewing their thoughts and opinion on every possible
topic” 27 . Or: “the round hole into which all bloggers dump their random thought”28 .


Surely, there are practical issues to be solved about for example accreditation and libel
and there are theoretical issues to be solved on matters of objectivity, credibility and
transparency. To quote another journalist from the Roth study: “What’s frightening to me, as
a ‘mainstream journalist’, is that anyone can set up a blog and start spewing opinions. Don’t
get me wrong here, I think blogging is a great opportunity to unite news consumers and
producers. But I spend a good deal of my time answering e-mails as to why the mainstream




26 Drezner & Farrell 2004
27 McCoy Roth 2004: 4
28 Ibdem p. 4


                                                                                           23
media isn’t chasing down some […] crazy rumor tossed out by a blogger who hasn’t tried to,
or doesn’t know how to, verify facts”29 .


The real question nonetheless is whether this should be a reason to distinguish a priori
between citizens and journalist, or just a posteriori differentiate the good news from the
bad. But aside from answering that question, we should not forget one simple thing: the
development is unstoppable. At this moment, there are over a million weblogs in the
Netherlands30 . From an exploratory research in the USA, Susan Herring and her colleagues
argue that about 3 percent of all weblogs has the intention of spreading knowledge in a
way that resembles journalism31 . This would lead us to conclude that there are about
30.000 bloggers with some journalistic aspirations. That is already about twice the total
population of Dutch professional journalists and these numbers do not seem to decline 32 .
All in all it seems that for every event there is truly someone out there willing to turn it
into a story.


3.2.3   CITIZENS PROVIDING AN ALTERNATIVE VOICE
Next to certain issues being too small, too local or too specialist to be covered by the
traditional news media, there is another reason that certain people feel they need to
speak out and report on things that normally do not make it to the news. Some issues are
just too controversial, or go against the leading opinion of the mainstream press. In some
countries it is even not allowed to say certain things at all.


The two most well known independent online news and opinion magazine are the
American Independent Media Centre, also known as Indymedia and the Korean
OhmyNews.com. Indymedia is the more traditional of the two, being founded in 1999 by
two anti globalization activists, who wanted to cover the Seattle WTO meeting from an
alternative perspective. Having people with cameras on the street filming protesters who
got molested by police officials, Indymedia proved to be a serious burden for US politics




29 Ibdem p. 19
30 Wieringa, 2006
31 Herring, Scheidt, Bonus & Wright 2006
32 Blanken & Deuze 2007


                                                                                         24
and serious competitor for traditional media. Nowadays, Indymedia is a large independent
news organization, with dozens of people all over the world providing content.


Contrary to Indymedia, OhmyNews.com didn’t stem from the political activist movement,
but was deliberately set out to be a citizen journalist enterprise. However, it gave a voice
to ten thousands of people, who wouldn’t be heard by the pretty conservative news elite
in South Korea. OhmyNews.com is now both a website and a weekly printed edition, that
are completely composed of amateur stories but edited by professional editors. The more
newsworthy the item is, the higher it is on the webpage and the more the original author
gets paid. This way, more than 15.000 people have already published one or more articles
and the site draws millions of visitors daily.


There are also countries where people are truly in need of an independent news medium,
simply because talking about certain subjects or having certain political views is
dangerous. Persianblog.com for example, is a website where Iranians can discuss matters
that are not allowed to be discussed freely, let alone be published about in traditional
media: sex, politics and popular culture.


3.2.4   CONCEPTUAL TENSIONS: OBJECTIVITY AND AUTHENTICITY
What I have been describing above is just the tip of the iceberg. But it helps to gain some
understanding in the way the new journalism landscape begins to take form. And when
analyzing at the examples, I think that for as far as creating news is concerned, it is not a
matter of choice between professional and amateur journalist. What matters is the fact
that there are arrangements possible in which both professional journalists and amateurs
have their role, that enables people to have their say and make sure that more diverse
voices can be heard. Yes, most weblogs are only interesting to the writer and maybe their
girlfriend or mother (considering the not empirically supported prejudice that most
bloggers are men), but this should not be a reason to dismiss the value of blogs altogether.
Quality of the reporting should of course always be preserved. But that quality is
something that can no longer be judged a priori, just by looking at who does the reporting.


It seems that either McLuhan provided us with a good account of the situation today, or
that he has always been right and only now we see ways how to put the collective


                                                                                          25
knowledge, time and willingness of the former audience to good use. As Gillmor is often
quoted: “my readers know more than I do”. Or, as he was corrected in an interview with NYU
associate journalism professor Jay Rosen: “my readers know more than I do and I can tap that
because they will tell me” 33 .


In their book “PopUp; the clash between old and new media”, Dutch journalist Henk
Blanken and media scholar Mark Deuze argue that: “Journalism has not become an
honorable profession by playing a crucial role in the maturing of the democratic state. The
professionalization has more to do with the ever-enduring commercialization of the business.
They values and standards of journalism – truthfulness, objectivity, ethics – originated from
the need of publisher, broadcasting companies and advertisers to reach the biggest possible
audience” 34 . As we have seen, this need for centralized news is not at stake anymore. It is
just as expensive to cater to a hundred small audiences, as it is to serve the single biggest
possible audience. Citizens are willing to come up with the content, straight from the
grassroots of their own local community or community of interest. Therefore a conceptual
tension exists between objectivity and authenticity. It is this tension that will be the first
one to be solved at the end of my investigation.


3.3      SELECTING NEWS
If we would allow the public only to participate in creating the news in a theory of
participatory journalism, we would forget one of the major implications of Web 2.0
technology. Because of the filter and search-engine mechanisms I described in chapter 2,
readers not only have the power to contribute to the agenda, they now also have the
power to influence the agenda. The former audience has a say in what is important or
relevant, not by selecting what is relevant before publication as happens in traditional
newsrooms, but by selecting from a large amount of already published information on the
Internet. Journalists used to think that, in their interaction with society, they decided
upon the relevant topics. But now we have a situation in which journalists are part of a
society that in a way sets its own topics and provide its own context, by strengthening the
value of a given piece of information in a given find engine.



33 Rosen 2004
34 Blanken & Deuze 2007: 11. Translation by the author


                                                                                           26
3.3.1   THE WISDOM OF CROWDS
The main reason that people engage in news-selection lies in technology. Not only
because it is possible to do so in an easy manner for a large group of people, but also
because the laws of the long tail have fundamentally changed publishing. Since the
dissemination of information is almost free, the order of journalism (or any information
producing genre for that matter) went from ‘filter, then publish’ to ‘publish, then filter’.
Nevertheless, it is common sense that one cannot pay attention to an unlimited amount of
stimuli at the same time with an equal amount of awareness per stimulus. Try reading a
newspaper and watching television at the same time, while someone is talking to you. So
in an attempt not to drown in the enormous information overload that the Internet can
sometimes seem to cause, people develop better and more efficient search and selection
mechanisms, both in technology and in their minds.


The other reason for people to engage in active news-selection is that they just want
better news. And by putting collective search, tag and link mechanisms to good use
people can achieve that. When Gillmor speaks about readers knowing more than
journalists do, he does not only mean that readers can be a journalists ears and eyes or that
readers can cover items for which professional journalists do not have the time, the money
or the interest. He also refers to a principle that is called the wisdom of crowds, which
states that when choosing the best option from a set of alternatives, a large crowd will
always on average do a better job than the single most intelligent individual in that crowd.


In his book “The wisdom of crowds”, first published in 2004, columnist James Surowiecki
described the phenomenon. When three specific rules apply, he states, the mean of the
mass is sometimes a better shot at the truth than the single claim of the most intelligent
individual in that mass. The rules are diversity (the crowd has to be heterogeneous, to
ensure that the people’s choices will indeed differ from one another), independence
(people have to be able to make a choice independent from one another, to ensure that
the people’s choices are not influenced by one another) and decentralization (there needs
to be no centralized source asserting power over the choice of the individuals).


When these three rules are applied, we see the wisdom of crowds in effect: the average
bet for the winning horse in horseracing is almost always correct. Ask a crowd of people


                                                                                          27
how many marbles there are in a jar and no one will be right, but their mean guess will be
close to the truth. When the Columbia space shuttle crashed, a specific manufacturing
company’s stocks immediately declined. It then took a couple of years to ‘officially’ find out
that this company was indeed guilty of the crash. And while exit polls in elections can
sometimes differ very much from the truth, having a virtual stock market where people
can bet on who they think will win almost always predicts the winner. Notice however,
that betting on who will win does not necessary has to be equal to who one is going to vote
for himself, a decision that can be very much influenced by social factors and thus violates
the rule of independence 35 .


The wisdom of crowds is both a highly overrated and a highly underrated phenomenon. It
is overrated by supporters of the theory, who tend to view it as a new route towards mass-
intelligence or collaborative innovation and by opponents of the theory who fear the
theory to be an excuse for exaggerated forms of populism. It is however underrated by
those who are indifferent and point out the fact that it is not a theory of ‘wisdom’ but just
the application of a statistical principle.


Essentially they are right; the wisdom of crowds is merely a combination between the law
of large numbers and the idea of a large group of people in which every individual has a
piece of the puzzle. In all of the examples mentioned above, we see this in effect. Jar
guessing is plain statistics. Horserace betting is mostly statistics and a little bit of ‘solving
the information puzzle’ and this is the other way around in the space shuttle example.
However, while we in fact have two types of crowd wisdom, one being collective guessing
and the other being collective correction on the basis of little bits of information, when
combined in an interactive mass medium the wisdom of crowds becomes usable. Not
because the crowd is good at providing new information, but because through collective
guessing and mutual correcting they crowd is good at selecting from a set of alternatives.


When applied to journalism, it means that while we do not always exactly know what we
individually think is important, we do a pretty good job collectively selecting what is
relevant and/or true. This is done explicitly through systems like Digg and Del.icio.us or



35 Surowiecki 2004


                                                                                              28
implicitly by adding specific tags of linking to an article on our own website, so that the
algorithms of Google or Technorati take effect.


The reversed order of publishing, then selecting, has pretty large effects on the way
citizens and journalists interact. Because of the huge amounts of data online, some of
which is plain false, for a piece of information to prevail as relevant and true is had to be
embedded in three ways in a set of external sources that have mutual links with the piece
of information at hand. First, other publications or well-read listing have to point a link to
it. In that way the piece gains authority on the basis of other peoples votes. Second, the
author has to point from the original article (and this goes for both professional and
amateur journalists) to other stories that he finds are equally good, in that way actively
embedding his publication in a certain preferred context. Third, he has to point to as much
of his original sources as he can to make his statement as transparent as possible. If he does
not do it someone else will, since so much information is publicly available.


3.3.2   THE ROLE OF INDIVIDUAL EXPERTS
Against this argument, one could argue: “But is selection and embedding (whereby
providing context) not one of the main tasks of a journalist?”. I think it indeed is and will
always be that way to a certain extend. Journalists are often better in selecting which
sources are relevant than most of individual people in the population, because they are
trained to do so and have a bigger network. And they are better in providing context,
because they usually do not write a single article on a single subject or a single event, but
do research and in doing so they keep tracking the developments in a certain field.
However, this does not contradict with any of the above for two reasons. First of all, these
journalists can find helpful allies in the relatively small group of people (but large in
absolute numbers!) that have expert knowledge or have done thorough research. Second,
as argued before, the ‘wisdom of crowds’ principle applies to choosing from a set of
alternatives, not providing the alternatives. We still need intelligent, educated and
concerned journalists and citizens to do research, collect data and write stories. But
collectively, we the people are pretty good at selecting from already published content.
Professional journalists as well as citizen journalists can use data, footage or articles from
other journalist or citizen sources when conducting research. In fact, they always do. So in
selecting what is true and relevant, journalists and citizens should also be able to tap into


                                                                                           29
the intelligence of the online collective. Even when the original author of the publication
has done his selection and has given a piece of information his context, it is to the
individual reader or the collective of readers to choose from a set of selections and
contexts, provided by a number of journalists as well as citizen sources. The flow of
information has become transparent and as a result our ways of selecting from the pool of
information have changed.


3.3.3   CONCEPTUAL TENSIONS: AUTHORITY AND TRANSPARENCY
People doubt what journalists say. Not because the journalism conducted by traditional
journalists is bad. Most of the traditional journalists do a pretty good and sometimes even
outstanding job, aside from a few media scandals, which I will address in the next
paragraph. People doubt because they can select from a set of alternatives and in that way
gain insight into the bias of any individual journalist. So a journalist, if he wants to prove a
point, has become dependent of the former audience to gain credibility. The faith of his
story is in the hands of later users of that story, an important point I will thoroughly address
in chapters five and six. A piece of journalistic information is no longer regarded as true or
relevant just because it is published by a certain journalist with authority or in a certain
newspaper or magazine with authority, but the crowd (aided by technology) forces
journalism has become transparent, notwithstanding journalists who want to keep an
elitist position or individuals who want to believe in media fairytales. This tension,
between the concepts of authority and transparency, will form the second conceptual
investigation at the end of this thesis.


3.4     COMMENTING ON THE NEWS
The last level, on which a citizen can be involved in journalism, is as commentator on the
news. This conversation should be interpreted both very concrete and in a more abstract
way. On the surface, it looks as though the possibility to comment on journalistic outings
has always been there. One could write a letter to the editor, send in an essay on the
opinion page of a newspaper, call a radio station while they are broadcasting or simply
react by no longer buying the newspaper or magazine and no longer viewing or listening
to a certain program. In a web 2.0 environment, these possibilities just find their
technically more advanced counterparts but are essentially nothing new.




                                                                                             30
3.4.1   JOURNALISM AS A CONVERSATION
Gillmor describes five new ways in which this traditional conversation can take place. First
of all, reporters can put their email address at the end of their stories, so the audience can
respond. Second, media organizations can start online forums and mailing lists on which
the staff itself is also part of the discussion. Third, editors can assemble and publish the best
comments posted by readers while supplying context. Fourth, journalists can engage in
live chats with their audience. And fifth, journalists can write their own weblog on which a
dialogue can take place 36 .


It are however not just these superficial outings of a conversation that are of main
importance here. What really counts is the fact that because of the inherent openness of
the new media, the audience demands a dialogue, whether the traditional media supplies
the possibilities or not. If they do, you can come in contact with the author of the original
piece and improve the quality of his work with your own input or comments. This way the
traditional journalist, or whoever the writer of the original piece is, can put the knowledge
and intelligence that exists among individuals in the crowd to good use. The larger the
reacting crowd becomes, the higher the chances are that someone will provide a valuable
reaction. From there, the original author can decide to use the comments to further
enhance his own work. For example Pop Up, the book by Blanken and Deuze and We The
Media by Dan Gillmor, both mentioned before, started out as an online open source
enterprise, where the draft version was made public and the audience was invited to
participate in writing the final version.


If the traditional media do nevertheless not provide an official channel through which you
can react, you can still express your thoughts. If you cannot react on a journalist’s weblog,
you react on your own. If you think that a piece of investigative journalism is incorrect, you
just gather your own facts through online sources and compose your own story. If you think
the media have set the wrong agenda, you don’t call; you set your own agenda. If you think
certain voices are missing from the dialogue, you add them. The big change is this:
commenting on the news can be done outside of mass-media regulated channels, thus




36 Gillmor 2004


                                                                                              31
classic mass-media journalists can assert less influence over the content and participants of
the conversation.


It is often said that journalists are the watchdogs of democracy. In this new world order,
the public becomes the watchdog of journalism. The act of citizens commenting on the
news has in the past also included the revealing of media scandals. Of the 55 important
recent media scandals reported by Wikipedia in 2007, 50 happened after 1997 37 . In many
of these, bloggers played a crucial role in discovering forgery, and manipulation38 .


3.4.2   CONCEPTUAL TENSIONS: INFORMATION AND CONVERSATION
The effect of all this, is that the primary task of journalists changes (note that by saying ‘task’
we explicitly do not mean the goals and values of journalism as defined in paragraph 3.1).
Journalism changes from gathering the facts and unilaterally providing a democracy with
information, to shaping the conversation. And the journalist must accept his changing role
from a teacher to a forum leader 39 . When done right, the possibilities are endless and have
a certain utopian quality to them for people who believe in democracy by an informed
citizenry. True conversations can start, not only between writers and readers, but also
between journalists and citizens as both writers and readers at the same level. It is
important to understand the difference: journalists must not only start a dialogue with
society. In this way of seeing the conversation, things still revolve too much around the
professional journalist. A true dialogue exists when journalists participate in the dialogue
that society, of which they are a part, has with itself. This conceptual tension, between the
communication models of information and conversation, is the base for the third and last
conceptual investigation in the coming chapters.




37 Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purported_United_States_journalism_scandals
38 Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_scandal
39 Gillmor 2004


                                                                                                32
4.      JOURNALISM IN ACTION
In the previous two chapters, I have set the stage for a conceptual analysis of participatory
journalism and the shifting roles of amateur journalists, professional journalists and others
who are using the writeable web for the dissemination of journalistic information in the
broadest sense. This has left us with a fairly flat and dry picture of participatory journalism.
Although I have described some of the developments of and touched upon some of the
issues arising in participatory journalism, I have not yet discussed in detail any of the
concepts involved (objectivity, authenticity, authority, transparency, information and
conversation). Nor have I lightened the stage with abstract notions that might further
clarify the subject matter. In this chapter I will do just that.


I will describe what participatory journalism is and how it functions, using Bruno Latour’s
‘In Action’-paradigm40 . Latour, a contemporary French philosopher, developed and used
this paradigm to build a radical new philosophy of science. In this and the following
chapter I will use some of his concepts to build a philosophy of participatory journalism.


In the following paragraph I will provide a brief outline of the ‘In Action’-paradigm and
some of the concepts that it constitutes: the concepts of controversy and collective and the
distinctions between science in action and ready-made science and between the model of
diffusion and the model of translation. Also, I will explain why I think this paradigm is now
applicable to journalism and not just to science.


4.1     LATOUR’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
In 1987 the French philosopher Bruno Latour published his major work, called Science in
Action. The main argument of this book is the following: there are two distinctive,
consecutive stages in the development of scientific knowledge, which need different
philosophical treatment. First there is the phase of producing the facts and machines of
science, called science in action. The outcome of this process is then called ready-made
science: the facts and machines of science themselves, accepted as such and usable in our
daily life, in our speech, and in our subsequent research.




40 Latour 1987


                                                                                             33
When we usually talk of scientific knowledge, we tend to talk about ready-made science.
These are the facts of science one reads in textbooks; statements about the world that
have been accepted as being uncontroversial. Examples of these are: “through
photosynthesis, trees transform carbon-dioxide into oxygen”, “the earth is round and
revolves around the sun” and “the structure of DNA is a double helix”. Technologies we use
on a more or less daily basis, which have established their function over and over again, like
computers, maps, camera’s etc. can also be called ready-made science. These facts are black
boxes: sets of statements and technologies, so very much entangled that we do not bother
opening them up. Latour explains these black boxes as follows: “No matter how
controversial their history, how complex their inner workings, how large the commercial or
academic networks that hold them in place, only their input and output count”41 .


But this ready-made science is as said just the (current) end result of research. The point of
closure, of black-boxing the facts, is preceded in time by the phase of science in action.
Every fact of science starts out as a claim, its factuality eventually being a consequence of
scientific action. It is thus possible to trace back every fact and artefact (something that has
proven not to be a fact) of science to a time and place when the fact was still a
controversial claim. We then speak of science in the making, instead of scientific
knowledge. From there, one can examine how the initial claim was eventually transformed
into a scientific fact or not. Also one can analyze claims that are still uncertain at the
moment. We are entering this stage in the development of scientific knowledge when, for
example, we talk about finding a cure for aids and cancer, fighting global warming,
building smaller and faster computers or investigating ‘new’ elementary particles.


Science in action can be characterized as the activity in which a fact-builder mobilizes42
many different actors to reaffirm his initial claims. The fact-builder is in this sense the
scientist, or any other person who wishes to make a scientific claim. The actors can be
human, like colleagues and other supporters who give weight to a claim, other scientists
who cite the claim in later scientific publications or people that use the fact or machine in
their scientific research or day-to-day business. They can also be non-human, such as other


41 Ibdem p. 3
42 Latour sometimes speaks of “enrolling” instead of “mobilizing”. For improved consistency, I will use
the term “mobilizing”, except when explicitly quoting Latour.


                                                                                                     34
facts and theories, equipment, and machines. Eventually, we call a claim ‘a fact’ when it has
been reaffirmed by such a large number of actors on such a large number of occasions, that
its existence as such becomes accepted. The fact-builder has succeeded in embedding his
claim in a network of associations, or what Latour calls a collective.


When a previously accepted fact or an artefact of science is explicitly up for debate, or
when two contradicting views exist on a certain scientific topic, we speak of a scientific
controversy. For instance, the cause of global warming could be said to be a controversial
topic. A controversy also occurs when scientific claims fail to reaffirm their quality in
conjuncture with other black boxes or new scientific knowledge under construction, for
example when new technology leads us to believe that the cause of a certain disease is
genetic in stead of bacterial. And this is the stage we are thrown back into, when, for
example, we are dealing with a space shuttle (a former black box) that suddenly explodes
in space. This once uncontroversial technology becomes a controversial topic, as the fact ‘a
space shuttle is a safe method of transportation’ is turned into nothing more than a claim
from a few engineers; the dead astronauts claim otherwise.


When a controversy is settled, the facts seem to have always been unproblematic and
uncontroversial. It looks as though nature itself prompted the settlement, and as though
the facts have always been out there, corresponding to a certain state-of-affairs in reality.
This is how the philosophers of science of the past (before Latour) have always looked at
scientific knowledge. One has to realize though, that while the controversy is still
unsettled or the claims are still problematic, the facts of Nature are not just out there
waiting to be discovered. The facts of Nature are the outcome of settling a controversy. So
it is in the settlement of controversies, that we not only shape our views of nature and
society, but also shape the facts of nature and society itself.


In view of the above, we can never look strictly at the outside world alone to see if a
statement is a fact. Both Nature and the methods of testing and interpreting it are
consequences of the settlement of controversies. Consider this example: if you want to
know something about a far away galaxy, you use a telescope. Based on what you see
through the telescope, you develop a theory about the galaxy you are investigating. But,
since you need the telescope to be able to see the galaxy, does what you see tell you


                                                                                          35
something about the properties of the galaxy or the properties of the telescope? In other
words, the means of testing and interpreting facts (the telescope) have been developed
simultaneously with the development of the fact (the properties of the galaxy) itself. Of
course there is a real galaxy out there; it is not a man-made fantasy. But its properties are
not just there, waiting for us to discover them. They are a result of the acceptance of a
certain arrangement of scientists, telescopes, publications and other allies needed to
investigate these properties.


Should both the facts and the instruments prove to be useful on many more separate and
diverse occasions, their factuality slowly increases. If the galaxy looks the same through a
different telescope, if its properties help explaining other cosmic events and if the
telescope proves to be a useful tool in investigating other galaxies, claims about both the
telescope and the galaxy gain strength. Eventually they might become black boxes, but
this is established only through later uses of these facts and means of testing.


Latour argues that a theory of science and thus a theory that has some degree of
correspondence to the way science empirically works, must be focused on how a scientific
claim becomes a usable fact or object in the process of settling the controversy: “The
impossible task of opening the black box is made feasible (if not easy) by moving in time and
space until one finds the controversial topic on which scientists and engineers are busy at
work. […] our entry into science and technology will be trough the back door of science in the
making, not through the more grandiose entrance of ready-made science” 43 .


In order to develop a theory of science, one should analyze current controversies and
realize that every scientific fact was once a controversy. From there, when one has
permitted and equipped oneself to do so, one can start to look at the people and things
that were involved in settling the controversy and the different roles that they played in
relation to one another. As Latour writes in his “first principle”, which will prove to be an
important asset to my theory of collective journalism: “The fate of facts and machines is in
later users’ hands; their qualities are thus a consequence, not a cause, of a collective action” 44 .



43 Latour 1987: 4
44 Ibdem p. 259


                                                                                                  36
4.2 FROM SCIENCE TO JOURNALISM
There are striking parallels between some of the issues mentioned in Latour’s theory and
some of the problems we have encountered earlier in this thesis. These parallels,
explained below, lead us to think that by looking at journalism in the way that Latour looks
at science and picking up some of the concepts involved, we will gain a better
understanding of participatory journalism in the same way Latour himself gained a better
understanding of science.


We live in a rapidly changing society, in which both social and technical arrangements are
being altered in various ways with far reaching consequences, as I described in chapters 2
and 3. We should, however, not separate the social from the technological, since the
technologies which form our means of disentangling, explaining and mobilizing the world
around us inherently shape what can be called Society and Nature; our view of the world
and the way we live in it. We exert influence on all the non-human objects in the world, by
developing them, putting them to use and providing them with relevance and agency,
while at the same time these objects exert influence on us by enabling and constraining
our actions. In this line of thinking, technologies are actors in themselves. Therefore there
is no dualism in which we have society on one hand and technology on the other. In stead,
society is made up of both human and non-human actors, which in their interaction define
for themselves and each other what ‘society’ is.


Journalists, who have to deal with all these changes, are themselves part of that society.
That means that it is useless to put journalists on a proverbial island, separate the
journalistic from the social, and then try to build a bridge between the island of the
journalists and the mainland of society. Instead we have to accept that there are mutual
interests between society and journalism as part of that society, and then study their
mutual influence. The journalist is as much part of the society whose events he tries to
report and explain, as the scientist is part of the world whose scientific laws he or she tries
to uncover.


Therefore, we have to examine a changing society, changing technologies and changing
journalism together, as one coherent changing landscape. Make use of Latour, the best
way of doing so is to look at the ways in which journalistic controversies get settled in this


                                                                                            37
changing world. Because the settlement of controversies, journalistic and scientific,
depends on both the people and the things that are made part of the controversy, we
cannot but conclude that when we agree on the existence of changing technologies,
changing journalistic techniques and changing journalistic actors, we have to accept new
ways of settling journalistic controversies and thus a changing Journalism. Consequently,
since an established news fact is only the outcome of settling a controversy, a different
Journalism produces different news.


Consider the following example, in analogy to the previous example of the galaxy and the
telescope. Most of our political ‘galaxy’ is visible only through ‘telescopes’ like press
conferences, official statements, regulated interviews, political journalists and the like.
Almost all political news-facts are the result of the acceptance of the fact that these
instruments and actors are able to provide us with useful news-facts. These instruments
legitimize the facts and, in turn, these instruments are legitimized by the amount of facts
they produce.


Sometimes though, we are suddenly confronted with contradictory claims about our
political reality. This happened, for instance, when a video showed up on Youtube in which
US senator George Allen called an Afro-American campaign volunteer a ‘macaca’45 . The
claim ‘George Allen is a racist’, which was the result of the appearance of the video on
Youtube, directly contradicted the claim ‘George Allen is a decent guy’, which was the
result of the carefully orchestrated journalistic arrangement through which we
encountered George Allen before.


The public gained insight into the properties of George Allen through new channels, as a
result of which their knowledge of his properties changed from him being decent, to him
being a racist. Because this showed us that the traditional journalistic arrangement lacked
the instruments to produce certain facts (‘George Allen is a racist’), we had a reason to
reconsider the instruments of the traditional journalistic arrangement causing or
knowledge of both the ‘galaxy’ and the ‘telescope’ to change at the same time.



45 Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r90z0PMnKwI
published on August 15, 2006


                                                                                        38
5.      SETTLING JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES
If one accepts that new technologies, and new relations between professionals and
amateurs provide us with new means of settling controversies and thus new means of
conduction journalism, one has to dive deeply into this process before redefining the
foundations it rests upon. This is what I did in the first part of this thesis. I looked at the new
technical arrangements that make a new journalism possible (chapter 2) and I looked at
the new social arrangements in which this new journalism takes place (chapter 3). Then, in
the previous chapter, I described a theory that can serve as a guideline in redefining the
foundations of journalism. To do so, I will first examine 3 of Latour’s main concepts as they
relate to journalism. In the concluding chapter of this thesis I can then try to solve the
conceptual tensions, described in chapter 3.


In paragraph 5.1 I will examine Latour’s concept of controversy in relation to journalism. I
will first argue that controversial issues in journalism can be analyzed in the same fashion
as controversial issues in science; an enterprise that is in and of itself different from
analyzing well-established facts. Furthermore, I will argue that since citizens are getting
involved in journalism, the fundamental fact that journalism deals with controversies
becomes more manifest. In paragraph 5.2 I will look at Latour’s model of translation and its
contrast with the model of diffusion. I will argue that adapting Latour’s concept of
translation, and therefore taking a different perspective on the way the news is brought to
the public, would solve a lot of the mutual mistrust between journalists and citizens. In
paragraph 5.3, I will look at Latour’s concept of the collective, and the specific notion of
factbuilding he derived from it. I will argue that adapting this notion results in a theory of
collective production of knowledge that can help to adequately evaluate the role of
citizens in journalism. Furthermore, from this new theory additionally arises a possibility to
put the intrinsic link structure of the web to greater use.


5.1     JOURNALISM AS SETTLING JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES
The process of journalism resembles the development of scientific knowledge. The types
of actors that have to be mobilized to turn a scientific claim into a fact do not differ very
much from the types of actors involved in doing so for journalistic claims. Journalists, like
scientists, have to do research in which they mobilize both human and non-human actors.
It is possible for a journalist to use black-boxed information (i.e. referring to previously


                                                                                                39
published facts) or technology (i.e. a photo camera) to establish his claim more firmly, like
it is possible for scientists to build on black-boxed theory or use scientific machinery (i.e. a
telescope). Also both in science and journalism, people judge and comment on each
other’s work as a system of peer review. In short, the activity of journalism is, just like
science, about settling controversies, and the ways of doing so are alike. Like in science, a
journalistic fact is not a fact until it has been reaffirmed by a multitude of actors and a
journalistic artefact is not an artefact until someone else has mobilized a stronger set of
actors that seem to reaffirm a contradictory claim.


5.1.1   WHAT ARE JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES?
Just like science, journalism also potentially produces ‘ready-made’ facts. These are the
facts that are the end result of a journalistic endeavor and eventually turn up in historical
textbooks. These are the facts that can be quoted or mobilized by another journalist, in
another place, at another point in time to build new claims upon. Yet in science it is easier
than in journalism to be distracted by the uncontroversial facts and the texts that express
them, as was the case with many philosophers of science from the past according to Latour.


For most people, when they learn about the settlement of a scientific controversy, the
scientific activity is something that has happened in the past. Only the end results of
research, the black boxes of ready-made science, are being used by people every day, or
being taught at school. Scientists successfully engage themselves in the business of
settling controversies, of building facts and machines, one could say. Many people use a
calculator, a certain medicine or the laws of gravity without ever questioning their
uncontroversial nature. So apart from a few scientific issues so controversial that we come
in contact with them often, either through politics or journalism, such as stem-cell
research, most people do not deal with science while it is still ‘in action’.


Journalism is, in contrast, usually about events that are happening at present or have
happened in the near past. The word ‘news’ has its origins in the word new. “Oh, but that is
old news”, is what people say when something is not really current anymore. Most
journalistic activity the public comes in contact with takes place when the claims are
neither yet facts nor artefacts or when the subject matter is controversial. The main reason
for this is that the process of resolving the controversies does not happen behind the


                                                                                             40
closed doors of the laboratory. The general public is constantly informed by the immediate
coverage of ‘newsworthy’ events and is thus confronted daily with contradictory claims
through multiple media channels.


This does not mean we do not hear straightforward things on the news, such as who won a
certain election or who became world champion in a certain field of sports. This type of
uncontroversial journalism is generally called ‘reporting’. Reporting produces the kind of
‘simple’ facts that, usually after they have been printed or broadcasted, become ready-
made journalism. These facts pretty soon leave the domain of journalism and enter the
realm of textbook history or encyclopedic knowledge.


However, on most occasions, people expect from news media what is called ‘journalistic
context’: an elaboration on the meaning of certain events. This is difficult however, since
we cannot ask any single journalist to find the facts on his or her own simply because the
facts are not out there waiting for him or her. As argued, the facts are produced within a
journalistic collective. Economic, political and cultural realities demand from this
collective a steady stream of news ‘facts’. Therefore, the public is confronted with
journalism in action most of the time they are consuming news.


Early 2002, the first reports appeared that the United States government was planning on
invading Iraq. The main given reasons given to do so, were the claims that Saddam
Hoessein’s regime was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and that he had ties
with terrorist organization Al-Qaeda. In the following period, the US government tried to
build a collective around these claims. They did intelligence research, collected evidence
from satellite pictures and eyewitness reports and literally tried to build a collective of
allies who supported the claim. At the same time, this information was disseminated to the
general public through mass media channels. So when the war formally started, on March
20th 2003, it was a fairly established fact that the Iraqi people needed to be ‘liberated’
from their regime with terrorist ties.


Now, more than four years later, a contradictory set of claims has become more factual. The
claims “there are no weapons of mass destruction” and “Saddam did not have ties with Al-
Qaeda” gain strength for everyday that these weapons and ties are not found. And the


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Collective Journalism

  • 1. COLLECTIVE JOURNALISM A THEORY ON THE CHANGING ROLE OF JOURNALISTS AND CITIZENS IN CONTEMPORARY JOURNALISM December 2007 Master’s Thesis Wijsbegeerte van een Wetenschapsgebied Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen Universiteit van Amsterdam Boris S. Nihom Supervisors: Stud. Nr.: 0039667 prof. dr. ing. G.H. de Vries boris.nihom@student.uva.nl dr. T.M.T. Coolen
  • 2. FOREWORD Writing a thesis is not supposed to be easy. If it were, it could never serve its function as a final proof of scientific ability in a student’s quest towards a degree. So when I started writing this thesis, I did not cherish the illusion that I was up for an easy task. And although it was already the second thesis that I wrote, it was still fun. Or at least it was highly interesting. Participatory journalism proved to be an inspiring, multidisciplinary topic. I have tried to write a thesis on the crossroads of philosophy and media studies and I believe I have succeeded in doing so. However, I could not have done so without the help of some very important people. First I would like to thank my supervisor Gerard de Vries for his patience, his great help and for all of his previous lectures that got me interested in the philosophical backgrounds of the subject in the first place. Second, I would like to thank Bruno Latour, for teaching me his theory in person during the Spinoza Masterclass in 2005. I feel lucky to have met an important philosopher, who was in fact still alive at the moment. Third I would like to thank Maurits Martijn, my partner in crime, for all our interesting discussions about the subject, our little writers holiday to France and of course our important friendship. Fourth I would like to thank Jorrit Nuyens, who did more than awesome job being correcting my use of the English language. Special thanks go out to Dan Gillmor for introducing me to the subject of citizen journalism. And last but not least I would like to thank my parents for both my nature and my nurture and especially for still paying my tuition fee. To all readers, please enjoy this thesis and please participate. In this thesis I will characterize the publication of any article, journalistic or scientific, as a possible starting point of a conversation. To adhere to my own rules I have started a weblog at www.collectivejournalism.org, where this thesis will be posted under a Creative Commons license, alongside a hyperlinked list of references and the option to comment. Boris Nihom December 2007
  • 3. ABSTRACT This thesis deals with the changing roles of two main actors in contemporary journalism, namely The Journalist and The Audience. This change is fuelled by the evolution of the Internet into a truly easily writable mass medium, caused by a set of recent technological innovations often called Web 2.0. The main effect of Web 2.0’s emergence is that the monopoly of the traditional mass media institutions on the creation and diffusion of information is slowly starting to fall apart. Nowadays, everyone with access to the Internet can share whatever he or she finds relevant, important, or just interesting, with the rest of the world. Journalism that involves citizens, layman and amateurs is usually called citizen journalism or participatory journalism. The fast growth of this phenomenon in the last five years has been the subject of many publications from scholars in journalism and media theory as well as articles from professional journalists and bloggers. In these articles, the advantages and disadvantages of citizen involvement are usually highlighted. I believe however, that the emergence of new forms of journalism causes more fundamental conceptual tensions about the way good journalism is perceived. These are the tensions between objectivity and authenticity, between authority and transparency, and between information and conversation. In this thesis I will characterize the changing relationship between journalists and citizens, and solve some of the conceptual tensions that are involved. I will do so by drawing on the work of the French philosopher Bruno Latour, and by employing the methods and conceptual framework that he used in his work on the philosophy of science. Based on his theory of science-in-action, I will argue for and define a theory of collective journalism that can give us insight into a new journalistic arrangement, which involves both citizens and professional journalists. Collective journalism is defined as fact-building storytelling aimed at all members of a society, which is authentic, transparent, and the reflection of a conversation that society has with itself; a conversation of which the publication of any single journalistic article can be a starting point, but should never be its definitive end.
  • 4. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 5 2. THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND WEB 2.0 9 2.1 SHARING INFORMATION 9 2.2 PUBLISHING INFORMATION 10 2.3 FINDING INFORMATION 12 2.4 USING MULTIMEDIA 14 3. CITIZEN PARTICIPATION IN JOURNALISM 16 3.1 WHAT IS JOURNALISM? 16 3.2 CREATING NEWS 19 3.2.1 CITIZENS AS EARS AND EYES OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS 20 3.2.2 CITIZENS AS MICRO JOURNALISTS 21 3.2.3 CITIZENS PROVIDING AN ALTERNATIVE VOICE 24 3.2.4 CONCEPTUAL TENSIONS: OBJECTIVITY AND AUTHENTICITY 25 3.3 SELECTING NEWS 26 3.3.1 THE WISDOM OF CROWDS 27 3.3.2 THE ROLE OF INDIVIDUAL EXPERTS 29 3.3.3 CONCEPTUAL TENSIONS: AUTHORITY AND TRANSPARENCY 30 3.4 COMMENTING ON THE NEWS 30 3.4.1 JOURNALISM AS A CONVERSATION 31 3.4.2 CONCEPTUAL TENSIONS: INFORMATION AND CONVERSATION 32 4. JOURNALISM IN ACTION 33 4.1 LATOUR’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 33 4.2 FROM SCIENCE TO JOURNALISM 37
  • 5. 5. SETTLING JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES 39 5.1 JOURNALISM AS SETTLING JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES 39 5.1.1 WHAT ARE JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES? 40 5.1.2 CITIZENS AS ALLIES IN SETTLING JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES 42 5.1.3 CITIZENS REOPENING JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES 43 5.2 TRANSLATING THE NEWS 45 5.2.1 TRANSLATION VERSUS DIFFUSION 46 5.2.2 APPLYING THE MODEL OF TRANSLATION TO JOURNALISM 47 5.2.3 NEW WAYS OF LOOKING AT COMMENTING 51 5.3 THE PROOF OF THE FACT IS IN THE COLLECTIVE 52 5.3.1 THE COLLECTIVE SETTLEMENT OF CONTROVERSIES 53 5.3.2 JOURNALISM AND TRUTH 55 5.3.3 JOURNALISM AS A COLLECTIVE EFFORT 56 5.3.4 USING HYPERLINKS TO MEASURE HE STRENGTH OF COLLECTIVES 57 6. A THEORY OF COLLECTIVE JOURNALISM 61 6.1 SOLVING THE CONCEPTUAL TENSIONS 61 6.1.1 OBJECTIVITY VERSUS AUTHENTICITY 61 6.1.2 AUTHORITY VERSUS TRANSPARENCY 63 6.1.3 INFORMATION VERSUS CONVERSATION 65 6.2 REDEFINING GOOD JOURNALISM 67 6.3 REDEFINING THE JOURNALIST 68 6.4 DEFINING COLLECTIVE JOURNALISM 69 BIBLIOGRAPHY 72
  • 6. 1. INTRODUCTION In 1990, when Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML, the programming language that forms the base for hypertextual web pages, one could still argue that the Internet was just an evolutionary step in the history of mass media. When Mosaic, the first graphic web-browser available to the public, was released in 1993, the same could be argued. When Google created what now seems to be the definitive search engine, it seemed a logical development for the Internet as we knew it. Also, the recent uprising of weblogs and multimedia content could lead a lay observer to think that the Internet is just progressing in its natural direction and that people are finally finding ways to use it to the fullest. However, looking back at the total development of mass media in the last century, one finds a major turning point around the year 2000. Not only has the turn of the millennium brought us the phantom threat of the millennium bug, a single currency in the European union and a series of terrorist attacks that would radically alter the geopolitical situation. It has also brought us the first mass medium that is easily writable, the Internet, in a new form that people have recently started calling Web 2.0. The traditional mass media were essentially either one-to-one, or one-to-many. The phone, the fax and, to a lesser extent, the telegraph were available to all, but had a limited reach. One could only reach a single other person. The printing press, radio, television and cinema were all one-to-many, but were only in the hands of a small group of people; the traditional mass media institutions. Essentially, they were all push media. But with the Internet, and specifically Web 2.0, we now have a genuine many-to-many pull medium (or one-to-many, few-to-many or few-to-few, whatever is required by the specific type of content). And it is not going anywhere anytime soon. In the words of Tim Berners-Lee, from an interview with the Dutch newspaper Het Parool: “The chances that the World Wide Web would collapse, were enormously large. That is what happens to most innovations: they come and go. Really, it would have taken just a little effort to make it fail. A company, a government, the scientific world, anyone could have stopped the Web. But we passed that point. Nowadays, no-one can turn the Web off anymore” 1. 1 Hendrickx 2007 (translation by the author) 5
  • 7. The main effect of Web 2.0’s emergence is that the monopoly of the traditional mass media institutions on the creation and diffusion of information is slowly starting to fall apart. The lines between producers and consumers of information have started to blur. Dan Gillmor, the influential technology journalist and founder of the Center for Citizen Media, coined the phrase “the former audience” in his book “We, The Media”2 . While in the traditional view the audience used to be a controllable, passive entity that needed to be fed with information, they are now not only selecting their own information but also becoming part of the process of creating and disseminating information. The word ‘information’ should be read in its broadest sense here: entertainment, science, journalism, the innovation of new technologies and the physical production of (information based) goods. It is important to note that this transition cannot simply be traced back to the rise of the Internet in the mid-90’s, or the rise of the personal computer in the mid-80’s. Of course these developments formed the foundation on which this new read/write medium could be built. However, it is mostly due to new technologies that emerged in the past five years, that it has become possible for every person with a connection to the Internet to publish its own share of information. Before that, the Internet and specifically the World Wide Web was of course a medium that linked an unprecedented amount of information, but it still took a specific set of tools and skills to be able to contribute to this. Nowadays, contributing is an option that is open to virtually everyone. The effects of this media revolution are visible in all types of information, which were previously exclusive to the big institutions of the mass media. However most of its consequences can be seen in entertainment and journalism. People have started publishing their own movies on Youtube and their own photo’s on Flick’r, they host their own virtual game shows in World of Warcraft, promote their own music on Myspace, and direct their own real life soap opera’s on their weblog, some of which can be seen as a voluntary reduction of privacy that goes far beyond the point Big Brother critics have always been afraid of. Journalism today is characterized by an immense growth of the amount and openness of information available to the public, and by an increase in the possibility for citizens to create and publish their own journalistic content. In many 2 Gillmor 2004: xxv 6
  • 8. instances, journalists used to be the ones who literally mediated the relationship between ‘the public’ and ‘the world out there’. Nowadays, the public has ways to cut out the middlemen and, as a consequence, has become ever more critical to the functioning of Journalism itself. We witness, in the words of Dan Gillmor, “Journalism’s transformation from a twentieth century mass media structure to something profoundly more grassroots and democratic” 3. This thesis focuses on journalism. More specifically, it focuses on the changing role of the two main actors in the journalistic arena, namely The Journalist and The Audience. Both parties nowadays seem to be facing important questions about their mutual involvement. There has always seemed to be a clear division of labor between the two: journalist make news, citizens consume news. The news simply was out there and readers either bought it or did not. The rise of the writable Internet shows at least that this separation is no longer in effect and that now, theoretically, everyone with a piece of information that he or she finds relevant, important, or just interesting, can share it with the rest of the world. At most, it might show that the strict separation between journalists and citizens, between the media institutions and the audience, between the production and the consumption of news has always been an illusion, doomed to be unveiled. In either case we are witnessing the rise of citizen journalism, sometimes called participatory journalism, in which both professional journalists and citizens, or amateur journalists, each play their role. Marc Chavannes, professor of Journalism at the University of Groningen, expressed his view on this changing role pattern as follows: “Within a few years, the big-media have lost their collective monopoly on uncovering news. The 8 o’clock news is a national family moment that a lot of people would rather loose, but he who does is not hopelessly uninformed. The news is everywhere”4. In another article he commented on the changing role of professional journalists: “In my ideal world, the journalist is a moderator who guides current events, elaborates on them en provides them with context, together with serious citizens who feel taken seriously” 5. 3 Ibdem p. xxiii 4 Chavannes 2007: 1 (translation by the author) 5 Termeer 2007: 5 (translation by the author) 7
  • 9. In the remaining of this thesis, I will dive deeply into the contemporary relationship between journalists and citizens. By drawing on the work of the French philosopher Bruno Latour, and by employing the methods and conceptual framework that he used in his work on the philosophy of science, I will characterize this relationship and solve some of the conceptual tensions that are involved. Finally I will argue for and define a theory of collective journalism that can give us insight into a new journalistic arrangement, which involves both citizens and professional journalists. By using this theory it is possible to differentiate between good and bad journalism, regardless of the formal job description of the people and things initially involved in the news making process. For now, it is important to describe in more detail the different manifestations of this new kind of journalism that is made possible by the emergence of web 2.0. First, in chapter 2, I will describe some of the technologies that made it all workable in the first place. This is necessary, in my view, to gain complete understanding of the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, which have fundamentally changed the way in which people can use the Internet. Then, in chapter 3, I will describe some of the ways in which both professional journalists and citizens are using these technologies for the production, selection and consumption of news and the conceptual tensions that this has as its result. In chapter 4 I will explain Bruno Latour’s theory in detail. From his theory I will derive a method (looking at journalism ‘in action’) and three main concepts (controversy, translation and collective). These method and concepts will be used to characterize contemporary journalism in chapter 5. In chapter 6, the concluding chapter of this thesis, I will solve the conceptual tensions mentioned in chapter 3 by redefining the tensions in terms of the journalistic adaptation of Latour’s theory. I will argue why a theory of collective journalism is better suited to the issues of our time than a theory of citizen or participatory journalism, while staying true to the original values of journalism in general. 8
  • 10. 2. THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND WEB 2.0 The emergence of a writable web did not just happen from one day to the next. People have always been able to share information through the Internet. The widespread use of e- mail is the most prominent example of this, but mailing lists and newsgroups were also around from the earliest days of the Internet, even before the web became graphic. These were mostly one-to-few applications though, in which a certain person shared his information with a designated group of people. These people got the information pushed to them instead of being able to pull it of the web whenever they wanted to. What is new about the toolkit, which carries the name of Web 2.0, is that it enables people to publish information, and not just share it. Also, it enables people to find relevant information fast and thorough, instead of waiting for it to be pushed to them while they can do nothing but hope it is relevant. Furthermore, it enables the use of moving images, photo’s and audio to enhance the information value. In this chapter I will describe the aforementioned tools for sharing information in more detail. This will be followed by a description of the new tools that enable the publishing and finding of relevant information, and the production of multimedia content. 2.1 SHARING INFORMATION The act of sharing information was the basic purpose for which the Internet was designed. Initially, this meant scientific or military information, but as soon as the public gained access, e-mail was one of the first features of the Internet, which immediately proved to be quite useful. The ability to send a pretty large amount of textual information to any other person in the world at virtually no costs (except for, of course, the money paid to gain access in the first place) was a giant leap forward for scientists, business people and journalists, but also for grandparents, (future) lovers and lost friends. It didn’t take long before people started to realize that if you can send out e-mail to a single other person, you can also send it out to a group of other persons. And so, the first mailing lists emerged. For example, Dave Farber, a telecommunications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, already had a mailing list called “Interesting People” in the mid-80’s. If he saw something that he found interesting, he would pass it on. He did not find 9
  • 11. the information himself. Correspondents he knew mostly sent it to him, or he would just read it in the newspaper. However, it was he who selected what was interesting or important. As he said himself: “I consider myself an editor in the real sense. This is a funny form of new newspaper, where the Net is sort of my wire service. My job is to decide what goes out and what doesn’t”6 . Nowadays, Dave Farber is far from alone in his mailing list operation. There are no exact figures on how many mailing lists there are out there. All I know is that I am subscribed to at least twelve, write one myself and that I am not the only one doing so. In the early days of the Internet, there was a specific popular protocol for a service similar to mailing lists. This protocol is called Usenet and instead of ‘mailing lists’ people used the term ‘newsgroups’. The big difference with mailing lists is, that it is not up to the sender to decide who can apply. Anyone can subscribe himself to a newsgroup and receive all the postings that are sent to this newsgroup. Sending is done simply by sending an e-mail to a central mailing address from which the text would be distributed to all subscribers. At the heydays of Usenet there were thousands of newsgroups, covering every subject one could think of, including most things considered illegal or immoral. Nowadays, Usenet is not as popular as it used to be. Not because its specific use is not considered valuable anymore, but merely because there is an easier method to achieve the same result, which is the use of forums. These are basically newsgroups that work via the Web instead of via e-mail. The main advantage is that now all the benefits of the Web can be used; from sharing multimedia content and using hyperlinks, to using advanced technology like cookies (little hidden programs that remember a user’s preferences). 2.2 PUBLISHING INFORMATION Sharing information with a predefined, relatively small group of ‘known’ people is one thing, but publishing information to the public at large is quite another. The technical ability to do so is one of the main characteristics of Web 2.0. It truly happens and is widely supported by the Internet community. We will look into some specific manifestations of Web 2.0, focused on journalism, in the next chapter. For now, let’s focus on the technologies that make this all possible. 6 In: Gillmor 2004: 19 10
  • 12. The main obstacle the Internet had to overcome before becoming writable was the fact that building a website was fairly hard. One either had to learn HTML or difficult website authoring software such as Adobe GoLive or Flash, which were mostly aimed at the professional design industry. This changed with the invention of two different types of technologies that separated content from appearance: Cascaded Style Sheets (CSS) and Content Management Systems (CMS). It is beyond the scope of this thesis to go into detail on either of these technologies. But simply put, it works like this: the programming code that determines the looks of a website is made by a professional designer and is saved into a CSS that applies to all future information that will be put on the website. Through a CMS every individual user has the ability to upload their content, which will be automatically shaped into the predefined style of the website in general. Using these technologies, it was now possible for companies to start building ‘empty’ websites, which could later be filled by its users. The prime example of this is the weblog. The weblog (or ‘blog’), is usually built on the basis of a weblog-publishing site like Blogger, Wordpress, or the Dutch blog publisher Blogo.nl. These sites provide their users with a nicely designed weblog framework and easy software to fill it with content. Today, there are blogs on every thinkable subject. According to weblog search engine Technorati, there were 70 million weblogs in April 2007 7 . Blogs can be really personal and deal with a person’s private life or a specific undertaking, like a long journey to a remote country. On the other side of the spectrum, blogs can be about specific technologies, politics, or a specific domain in science. Somewhere in between, blogs can be about the author’s view on the world around him or her, and can be written in a more or less journalistic fashion. Some people consider the blog to be a specific genre. I think they are right for as far as the highly personal, diary-like blogs are concerned. For disseminating scientific or journalistic content however, it is just a technology for publication. All that defines weblogs is that they are “online journals, comprised of links and postings in reverse chronological order”8 . These postings are usually short and frequently updated. They can contain text, images, video or just a collection of hyperlinks to other web pages. On some 7 Sifry 2007 8 Gillmor 2004: 29 11
  • 13. blogs only a specified person is authorized to post, while others give people the option to comment. And then there are some blogs, like the famous tech-blog Slashdot.org, that are entirely written by their virtual community. Another famous example of a website that thrives on content provided by its community is Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Wikipedia is based on the technology of wiki’s, invented by Ward Cunningham in de late 1990’s. A wiki can be defined as: “a server program that allows users to collaborate in forming the content of a website. With a wiki, users can edit the site content, including other users’ contributions, using a regular web browser”9 . Wikipedia started in English on Januari 15, 2001 as an open-source, free encyclopedia. As of November 2006, there are Wikipedias in 174 different languages that have more than 100 articles, 51 of which have over 10,000 articles, and 17 of which have over 50,000 articles. Following the English language Wikipedia, one of the top-10 most visited websites on the Internet, the German, French, Polish, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Spanish, Russian and Finnish editions have over 100,000 articles each. The company behind Wikipedia, called Wikimedia also initiated side projects like Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote and the Wiktionary. Others have taken up the concept and put it to their own use, like the open-source travel guide Wikitravel. Also, the wiki technology is being used more and more by companies and other private institutions to serve as an internal knowledge database 10 . 2.3 FINDING INFORMATION Needless to say, it is necessary for a medium, through which so much information is so easily published, to be highly searchable. What do you need massive amounts of information for, if you cannot find what you need? Search technology has therefore been a huge business ever since the Internet has become available to the public. There is a big difference however, between the search technologies from the past and the search technologies from the present and, presumably, the future. Past technologies could 9 Jennings 2006 10 Wikipedia 2007 12
  • 14. be rightfully labeled search technologies: they helped a user searching for some specific information, which he himself found relevant. In contrast, modern search technology behaves more like find technologies. The network itself aggregates all available information and finds whatever it thinks is relevant for a certain user, based on search entries of varying specificity. Sometimes, these technologies are therefore also called aggregation engines. Since the rise of these find-technologies, it is no longer a matter of being found, but one of being found relevant. The first search engines, like Yahoo and Altavista, were simple. When given a query, they compared the search terms to all the web pages in their database. Then they ranked the pages according to their overlap with the search word or sentence. But in 1995, two Stanford Univiersity students developed a new kind of search engine: Google. Google radically changed the way search engines work. Using their own algorithm called PageRank, Page and Brin developed a search engine that not only searches for overlap between a search query and a web page, but also estimates the relevance of a page based on it’s popularity. As is written on their own website: “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’. Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance” 11 . It is vital for the rest of this thesis, to understand the implications of PageRank: it empowers people to influence the likelihood that any given piece of information online will be found as a result of a search query, by linking to this piece of information from their own website, blog or other web-based medium. So keep this in mind when you are searching something on Google: an anonymous mob and an equally anonymous algorithm are helping you and those with equal search terms decide what to find relevant. 11 Google 2007 13
  • 15. There is another example of a find technology, that works just like this: RSS. This technology makes it possible to add a multitude of tags to a piece of information, like a blog posting or an article published online. For example, this thesis could have been tagged ‘thesis’, ‘journalism’, ‘web 2.0’, ‘Internet’, ‘philosophy’, etc. Readers can then download an RSS reader, and subscribe to any number of weblogs or other pages with a so- called RSS feed. By telling the RSS reader which tags you are interested in, the reader automatically refreshes at a certain interval, showing you all new postings that carry the specified tags. So depending on which tags you tell the program you find interesting, the program aggregates all information and decides which parts are relevant. A last type of find engines contains those engines that are not based on an algorithm at all, but strictly on the social capacities of the Internet. Del.icio.us is, for example, a website which enables people to store their bookmarks online. Based on a comparison between your bookmarks and those of all the other people on Del.icio.us, the website recommends other sites to you that you will probably be interested in. Using the same principle, the online store Amazon.com was the first store to inform customers with the buying behavior of potential like minds. This is a function now seen as a key advantage of online stores over their real world counterparts. Last.fm does the same for webradio, based on the music playlist on your computer. Further, there are technologies like Digg and eKudos, which provide readers with a way to rate blog-postings, so the program can decide whether or not to recommend a certain posting to someone. In short, people have more power to influence what other people will find when they are searching, since the emergence of Web 2.0. So because of Web 2.0, people have more power to influence what is found relevant and what makes it to the political, social or journalistic agenda. Meanwhile, the guys at Google are on a quest to map all the information in the world based on these principles. 2.4 USING MULTIMEDIA A last feature of Web 2.0 is based on two developments that mutually enhance each other: broadband and compression. While the Internet keeps getting faster and faster, diverse companies come up with solutions to compress huge amounts of data, especially images, audio and video. Also, at the same time, digital (video) cameras keep getting smaller, 14
  • 16. cheaper and better, as do the cameras on mobile phones. Consequently, the web is becoming writable not only in a textual, but also in an audiovisual way, which previously seemed to be exclusive to the traditional mass media. Consumers of information used to see most of the world through the eyes of the mass media. Now, there is an army of reporters out there on the street that can capture and publish whichever image they like. With the push of a button people can show you their boy- or girlfriend, their pet, how well they can dance, sing or play the piano, what their house looks like, or – regardless of the subject – how good a photographer or filmmaker they consider themselves to be. Websites like Youtube (for video), Flickr (for foto’s) and Myspace (used widely for music), are filled up every single day with incredible amounts of so called user generated content. By far the largest part of this information is personal content, or entertainment based content. However, the modern multimedia toolkit also gave us world famous images of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the London city metro bombings, the New Orleans flooding and the 2004 Tsunami. This gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘eye witness’. Questions about how many people actually take part in this phenomenon are interesting, but are not of major importance in the scope of this these. For a conceptual understanding of the developments that are taking place, one just has to look at the options for participation these technologies create. Since new methods of sharing, publishing and finding information are combined with modern multimedia technologies, we see a whole new media landscape arising. Web 2.0 forms the basis for a new window through which we see the world. No longer is the scope of our worldview limited by the subjective or agenda-driven determination of relevance, made by a select group of experts, journalists, reporters, editors, filmmakers or writers. We ourselves have the tools in hands to publish and select the facts and opinions that shape our view of the world, spread those facts and opinions and comment on the view of others. The next chapter will be dedicated to how this new media landscape has changed the journalistic practice. I will describe several ways in which citizens are using their newfound ability to create, select and comment on journalistic information. 15
  • 17. 3. CITIZEN PARTICIPATION IN JOURNALISM In the previous chapter, I described some of the most influential technologies behind Web 2.0 and the new participatory journalism movement. That is, however, not enough to fully encompass the changes brought about by this development. In analyzing journalism, one should not only focus on the technologies behind journalism and the changing media channels through which information flows. In addition, one should look at how these technologies are used and what it is that journalists, professional or amateur, do. So before turning on my philosophical flashlight to shine some light on the conceptual characteristics of participatory journalism, I should first take a walk through the new landscape in which these concepts have become relevant. I will describe the new journalistic landscape and specifically focus on the role of the traditional journalist and the former audience in more ‘human’ and practical terms instead of the technological terms than were used in the previous chapter. First, I will take a short look at the definition of journalism, to see what can be analyzed as such and what cannot. Then I will look at the three levels on which citizens engage in journalism. I will conclude each of these three paragraphs with some broader observations on the differences between old en new journalism, the concepts involved and the tensions between them. Solving these conceptual tensions will be the primary goal of my analysis in the second part of this thesis. It is important to note that the separation of journalism into three different levels is only for the purpose of conceptualization. In the real world, and in the model presented in the next chapter of this thesis, these three levels are mixed up and sometimes even indistinguishable. 3.1 WHAT IS JOURNALISM? The main problem one encounters when trying to find a definition of journalism is that more than often journalists themselves use a fairly tautological description of their work. To them, journalism is ‘what journalists do’ or “whatever people generally recognized as journalists do whenever they say they are doing their jobs”12 . The problem with this definition is that it provides no boundaries as to who can be counted as journalist and who cannot. They are neither inclusive nor exclusive in nature so they are useless when 12 Van Eick 2005. In Dasselaar 2006: 42 16
  • 18. analyzing journalism practiced by people whose identity as journalists is at stake in the first place. And not only do these definitions fail to tell us who is a journalist and who is not, their focus on recognition makes it unnecessarily complicated to use them in multiple social environments, each with their own implicit standards of recognition. Can ‘corporate journalists’ be considered journalists? Are ‘citizen journalists’ recognized as journalists? To some they are, to others they are not. This incongruence of the definition is at the heart of the matter. Another possible route to defining journalism, is to look at journalism as an occupation which serves a certain goal or set of goals. In 2001, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel published a book called “The Elements of Journalism” in which they define journalism on the basis of nine elements: 1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth 2. Its first loyalty is to citizens 3. Its essence is a discipline of verification 4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover 5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power 6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise 7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant 8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional 9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience. These elements combined ultimately lead to their definition: “The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self governing”13 . Journalism can also be defined as a description of what journalists do: “The profession of gathering, editing and publishing news reports and related articles for newspapers, magazines, television, or radio” 14 . Dutch researchers Van Eick15 and Deuze 16 also take this 13 Kovach & Rosenstiel 2001: 17 14 The Encarta World English Dictionary 2007 15 Van Eick 2005 16 Deuze 2005 17
  • 19. route albeit in a much more abstract way. Both conclude that the heart of journalism lies in storytelling. The ability to turn a simple state of affairs into a narrative, is what separates journalism from the mere reporting of facts, as happens for example in an encyclopedia. Elements number 7 and 8 from Kovach and Rosenstiel’s description can be said to describe this part of the process of storytelling. It is this competence of professional journalists that is widely used to argue against the involvement of citizens. They are believed not to posses this competence, due to a lack of professional education or talent. In the next chapter I will argue on philosophical grounds that there is also another possible way of defining storytelling, which is different from the task of writing nice stories and turning simple events into narratives with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In this definition, storytelling is comparable with showing that ones interpretation of relevant events is the right one and the capacity of turning simple facts into a comprehensible narrative is one of the resources which can be used in doing so. And since I, along with Kovach & Rosenstiel, defined the goals of journalism as “providing citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing” and since “a journalists first obligation is to the truth”, I believe a journalist should and will always try to show why his interpretation of relevant events is right. That is why I argue that storytelling is the essence of journalism, contributing to all 9 elements, and can therefore function as a demarcation criterion between good and bad journalism, but not a priori between citizens and journalists. Combining all the aforementioned methods and definitions, Arjan Dasselaar arrives at the following definition in his influential empirical investigation into the world of webloggers, “The Fifth Estate; On the journalistic aspects of the Dutch blogosphere”: “Journalism is truth seeking storytelling aimed at citizens, which is editorially independent”17 . His definition is very open: it can include both professional and nonprofessional journalists and what is regarded ‘news’ can vary, as long as it seeks a truthful reporting and explanation of events and is editorially independent. It is this definition of journalism that I will use in the remaining parts of my thesis and which can also serve as the basis for a definition of collective journalism. 17 Dasselaar 2006: 47 18
  • 20. In the following three paragraphs I will describe the role of citizens in the (online) journalistic process, based on this definition and some of the elements of journalism as defined by Kovach and Rosenstiel. I will look concretely at how citizens are involved on three different levels: creating news, selecting news and commenting on the news. 3.2 CREATING NEWS The most commonly known form of participatory journalism, or citizen journalism, is the one where citizens actively participate in creating the news. This is essentially not a new development. If we go back in time a little, we find examples of pirate radio, fanzines and amateur ‘newspapers’ made with a typewriter, glue, a pair of scissors and an old copier. However, since Web 2.0 made mass-diffusion of information possible, people have started to use their ability to engage more and more. According to Gillmor, the population of news-creating citizens consists of two types of people. First are the people who have been practicing some form of participatory journalism, in their own way, before the read/write web became available. These people are the ones who used to write letters to the editor, made small, local, and often critical amateur magazines or made the amateur fanzines and newspapers mentioned above. They are the people that could and can be found in for example underground music scenes or political activist movements. Second is the former audience: people who used to be passive consumers of the news, but who are now becoming a source of information for other citizens and for professional journalists18 . Members of the former audience have different motives for engaging in journalism, ranging from the simple technical possibility (as described in chapter 2) to the satisfaction of certain needs. Bowmann and Willis describe some of these needs, including the will to be heard, the will to connect with others who have similar interests, the will to gain status in a given community and the will to inform others on a specific field in which one is an expert 19 . 18 Gillmor 2004 19 Bowmann & Willis 2006: 47 19
  • 21. According to Gillmor: “The issues of our time are too complex, too nuanced, for the major media to cover properly, given the economic realties of modern corporate journalism” 20 . I will now describe a number of reasons in which citizen journalists have proven to be useful to professional journalists and provide an example for each one. 3.2.1 CITIZENS AS EARS AND EYES OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS The most commonly known form of citizen journalism is highly based on multimedia technology. It is a form in which citizens are not really ‘doing journalism’, but are merely acting as a source for professional journalists, providing photos, videos and audio recordings to the press. Whether the content is provided directly to the press or mediated by websites such as Youtube, Flick’r or the specialized Dutch news website Skoeps.nl (which claims to have “16 million reporters”, equaling the number of citizens in The Netherlands), the point is that there are far more citizens with a camera (or mobile phone) than there are professional reporters. Another advantage is the considerable shortening of journalistic response-time. While it may take some time for professional reporters to come to the scene, there will always be some people ready on the spot to record the events. This is not a completely new development though. People would not have seen the assassination of John F. Kennedy if it were not for a citizen with a camera. People wouldn’t have seen, let alone have rioted over the Rodney King beatings if it were not for a citizen capturing what happened. These events, where the audience got to feel present at, used to be exceptions to the rule. Most of what happened in the world that was not covered by the traditional press, stayed in the dark. However, since the dispersal of the digital camera and the camera-equipped mobile phone, having a witness on the spot is the rule. Also in the past, journalists found out much of what they knew from people who told them things. But nowadays, people do not have to find a journalist first who finds the time to listen. Whether the press responds or not, people can always publish the material themselves. And while of course the traditional mass media are still the best option to go for if you want to reach a large audience, the competition is fierce. We cannot neglect the one billion mobile phones sold in 2006 alone 21 and the possibilities they bring along. 20 Gillmor 2004: 103 21 Palmer 2006 20
  • 22. As obvious and ubiquitous as is it, this is still a fairly controversial form of participatory journalism. Why? Because most ‘traditional’ journalists, when asked their opinion about citizen journalism, point out this feature and argue that citizens should not pretend to be journalists, when they are merely its eyes and ears. Famous Dutch new media journalist Francisco van Jole, who is also a rigorous citizen journalism critic, made this point on several occasions. In the next chapter, we will see that a philosophical misunderstanding is causing this skepticism. Having people to serve as their eyes and ears is not a mere task at all, but an essential property of the way in which journalists enable themselves to achieve their goals in the first place. Trying to keep up a strict division between journalists on one hand and society on the other causes more problems than that it solves. 3.2.2 CITIZENS AS MICRO JOURNALISTS Marshall McLuhan once said: "For any problem, there is a person or persons in a large population of educated people that doesn't see it as a problem"22 . For journalism this could be paraphrased as: “For every event, there is someone who has more knowledge or a stronger opinion about it than others”. This person might be willing to cover the event and turn it into a news story. This is the key aspect of the next form of citizen news production I want to discuss and that I will call micro journalism or micropublishing. Instead of citizens acting as sources or supplying content to journalists, we are now talking about citizens taking up some or all of the tasks of professional journalists and publishing their own content on their own website or on some sort of institutionalized participatory journalism endeavor. These usually take the form of a weblog, because it is by far the easiest way to do so by far. Keep in mind though, that the weblog is just a technology and not per se a genre or medium in itself. The principle behind micro-journalism is called ‘The Long Tail’, a term coined by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of the influential technology magazine Wired23 . Part of his theory is this: on the Internet, the storage of large amounts of information is unlimited in its capacity and theoretically costless. The relative costs of an extra unit of information are consequently nil, in contrary to goods in the real world. That’s why it becomes interesting 22 In: Gillmor 2004: 108 23 Anderson 2006 21
  • 23. for media organizations, and affordable to citizen-owned initiatives, to cater to a large amount of small audiences instead of a small amount of large audiences. Of course there aren’t enough journalists to cover all the events that all small audiences find interesting, but it is possible to cater to as much small audiences as there are people with journalistic aspirations. Considering then the fact that more than one billion people are online today24 , for every event there is indeed a high chance that there is a person willing to cover it. This creates the opportunity for highly localized and highly specialist or expert- based journalism. A famous example of highly localized news is the free online and offline newspaper Bluffton Today, in a rapidly growing city in the state of South Carolina. The newspaper has a circulation of about 17.000 and the website blufftontoday.com is visited 36 times each month per household25 . All content, both on the website and in the printed version, is supplied by the over 2000 registered users, some of whom are professional journalists, but most are just members of the community. Another example is the Melrose Mirror, an online publication in Melrose, Massachusetts. It was founded by MIT’s News-In-The-Future Consortium and is being edited by a group of senior citizens who do so out of love for the community. Outside of the United States, big national newspapers like the French Le Monde or local Dutch newspaper Twentsche Courant Turbantia and local television station RTV Utrecht have (parts of) their online counterpart dedicated to local news and edited by local citizens. Another common form of micropublishing is the expert blog. These are blogs, covering news from a certain area of expertise. This type of blogs is most popular within the ICT (macworld.com), technology (bright.nl) and marketing (adage.com) communities, not in the last place because the people in these fields were early adapters of the Internet phenomenon itself. However, also in other fields like cars (autoblog.com) or audio equipment (gearslutz.com), the number of expert blogs and forums is growing very rapidly. 24 See http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm 25 Blanken & Deuze 2007: 92 22
  • 24. The last form of micro journalism is aimed at the grassroots. Advocates from a specific area of the political spectrum can have their own online publications, like the Belgian progressive liberal website www.liberales.be or the Dutch neo-conservative website www.conservatismeweb.com. Finally, websites can be devoted to covering all the ins and outs of particular social issues, like climate change (realclimate.org). This development creates tremendous options for traditional mass media organizations and professional journalists in both their online and offline activities. They can collect the best news items from these alternative sources and cover them. In their article “The power and politics of blogs”, Drezner and Farrell show that this is exactly what happens and this ‘trickle-up’ effect is what made some notorious webloggers into professional journalists or even celebrities, like the now world famous blogger Instapundit. Even if the name of the original blogger stays unknown, traditional media organizations are building more often on stories that citizens first brought under their attention26 . There is a lot of skepticism towards these amateur news sites and weblogs. Traditional journalists do not acknowledge most of them. They suspect them of being focused too much on the private life and subjective views of the author and not following the rules and goals of journalism. As some journalist said, in a study by Marci McCoy Roth from 2004: “[the blogosphere is] people incessantly spewing their thoughts and opinion on every possible topic” 27 . Or: “the round hole into which all bloggers dump their random thought”28 . Surely, there are practical issues to be solved about for example accreditation and libel and there are theoretical issues to be solved on matters of objectivity, credibility and transparency. To quote another journalist from the Roth study: “What’s frightening to me, as a ‘mainstream journalist’, is that anyone can set up a blog and start spewing opinions. Don’t get me wrong here, I think blogging is a great opportunity to unite news consumers and producers. But I spend a good deal of my time answering e-mails as to why the mainstream 26 Drezner & Farrell 2004 27 McCoy Roth 2004: 4 28 Ibdem p. 4 23
  • 25. media isn’t chasing down some […] crazy rumor tossed out by a blogger who hasn’t tried to, or doesn’t know how to, verify facts”29 . The real question nonetheless is whether this should be a reason to distinguish a priori between citizens and journalist, or just a posteriori differentiate the good news from the bad. But aside from answering that question, we should not forget one simple thing: the development is unstoppable. At this moment, there are over a million weblogs in the Netherlands30 . From an exploratory research in the USA, Susan Herring and her colleagues argue that about 3 percent of all weblogs has the intention of spreading knowledge in a way that resembles journalism31 . This would lead us to conclude that there are about 30.000 bloggers with some journalistic aspirations. That is already about twice the total population of Dutch professional journalists and these numbers do not seem to decline 32 . All in all it seems that for every event there is truly someone out there willing to turn it into a story. 3.2.3 CITIZENS PROVIDING AN ALTERNATIVE VOICE Next to certain issues being too small, too local or too specialist to be covered by the traditional news media, there is another reason that certain people feel they need to speak out and report on things that normally do not make it to the news. Some issues are just too controversial, or go against the leading opinion of the mainstream press. In some countries it is even not allowed to say certain things at all. The two most well known independent online news and opinion magazine are the American Independent Media Centre, also known as Indymedia and the Korean OhmyNews.com. Indymedia is the more traditional of the two, being founded in 1999 by two anti globalization activists, who wanted to cover the Seattle WTO meeting from an alternative perspective. Having people with cameras on the street filming protesters who got molested by police officials, Indymedia proved to be a serious burden for US politics 29 Ibdem p. 19 30 Wieringa, 2006 31 Herring, Scheidt, Bonus & Wright 2006 32 Blanken & Deuze 2007 24
  • 26. and serious competitor for traditional media. Nowadays, Indymedia is a large independent news organization, with dozens of people all over the world providing content. Contrary to Indymedia, OhmyNews.com didn’t stem from the political activist movement, but was deliberately set out to be a citizen journalist enterprise. However, it gave a voice to ten thousands of people, who wouldn’t be heard by the pretty conservative news elite in South Korea. OhmyNews.com is now both a website and a weekly printed edition, that are completely composed of amateur stories but edited by professional editors. The more newsworthy the item is, the higher it is on the webpage and the more the original author gets paid. This way, more than 15.000 people have already published one or more articles and the site draws millions of visitors daily. There are also countries where people are truly in need of an independent news medium, simply because talking about certain subjects or having certain political views is dangerous. Persianblog.com for example, is a website where Iranians can discuss matters that are not allowed to be discussed freely, let alone be published about in traditional media: sex, politics and popular culture. 3.2.4 CONCEPTUAL TENSIONS: OBJECTIVITY AND AUTHENTICITY What I have been describing above is just the tip of the iceberg. But it helps to gain some understanding in the way the new journalism landscape begins to take form. And when analyzing at the examples, I think that for as far as creating news is concerned, it is not a matter of choice between professional and amateur journalist. What matters is the fact that there are arrangements possible in which both professional journalists and amateurs have their role, that enables people to have their say and make sure that more diverse voices can be heard. Yes, most weblogs are only interesting to the writer and maybe their girlfriend or mother (considering the not empirically supported prejudice that most bloggers are men), but this should not be a reason to dismiss the value of blogs altogether. Quality of the reporting should of course always be preserved. But that quality is something that can no longer be judged a priori, just by looking at who does the reporting. It seems that either McLuhan provided us with a good account of the situation today, or that he has always been right and only now we see ways how to put the collective 25
  • 27. knowledge, time and willingness of the former audience to good use. As Gillmor is often quoted: “my readers know more than I do”. Or, as he was corrected in an interview with NYU associate journalism professor Jay Rosen: “my readers know more than I do and I can tap that because they will tell me” 33 . In their book “PopUp; the clash between old and new media”, Dutch journalist Henk Blanken and media scholar Mark Deuze argue that: “Journalism has not become an honorable profession by playing a crucial role in the maturing of the democratic state. The professionalization has more to do with the ever-enduring commercialization of the business. They values and standards of journalism – truthfulness, objectivity, ethics – originated from the need of publisher, broadcasting companies and advertisers to reach the biggest possible audience” 34 . As we have seen, this need for centralized news is not at stake anymore. It is just as expensive to cater to a hundred small audiences, as it is to serve the single biggest possible audience. Citizens are willing to come up with the content, straight from the grassroots of their own local community or community of interest. Therefore a conceptual tension exists between objectivity and authenticity. It is this tension that will be the first one to be solved at the end of my investigation. 3.3 SELECTING NEWS If we would allow the public only to participate in creating the news in a theory of participatory journalism, we would forget one of the major implications of Web 2.0 technology. Because of the filter and search-engine mechanisms I described in chapter 2, readers not only have the power to contribute to the agenda, they now also have the power to influence the agenda. The former audience has a say in what is important or relevant, not by selecting what is relevant before publication as happens in traditional newsrooms, but by selecting from a large amount of already published information on the Internet. Journalists used to think that, in their interaction with society, they decided upon the relevant topics. But now we have a situation in which journalists are part of a society that in a way sets its own topics and provide its own context, by strengthening the value of a given piece of information in a given find engine. 33 Rosen 2004 34 Blanken & Deuze 2007: 11. Translation by the author 26
  • 28. 3.3.1 THE WISDOM OF CROWDS The main reason that people engage in news-selection lies in technology. Not only because it is possible to do so in an easy manner for a large group of people, but also because the laws of the long tail have fundamentally changed publishing. Since the dissemination of information is almost free, the order of journalism (or any information producing genre for that matter) went from ‘filter, then publish’ to ‘publish, then filter’. Nevertheless, it is common sense that one cannot pay attention to an unlimited amount of stimuli at the same time with an equal amount of awareness per stimulus. Try reading a newspaper and watching television at the same time, while someone is talking to you. So in an attempt not to drown in the enormous information overload that the Internet can sometimes seem to cause, people develop better and more efficient search and selection mechanisms, both in technology and in their minds. The other reason for people to engage in active news-selection is that they just want better news. And by putting collective search, tag and link mechanisms to good use people can achieve that. When Gillmor speaks about readers knowing more than journalists do, he does not only mean that readers can be a journalists ears and eyes or that readers can cover items for which professional journalists do not have the time, the money or the interest. He also refers to a principle that is called the wisdom of crowds, which states that when choosing the best option from a set of alternatives, a large crowd will always on average do a better job than the single most intelligent individual in that crowd. In his book “The wisdom of crowds”, first published in 2004, columnist James Surowiecki described the phenomenon. When three specific rules apply, he states, the mean of the mass is sometimes a better shot at the truth than the single claim of the most intelligent individual in that mass. The rules are diversity (the crowd has to be heterogeneous, to ensure that the people’s choices will indeed differ from one another), independence (people have to be able to make a choice independent from one another, to ensure that the people’s choices are not influenced by one another) and decentralization (there needs to be no centralized source asserting power over the choice of the individuals). When these three rules are applied, we see the wisdom of crowds in effect: the average bet for the winning horse in horseracing is almost always correct. Ask a crowd of people 27
  • 29. how many marbles there are in a jar and no one will be right, but their mean guess will be close to the truth. When the Columbia space shuttle crashed, a specific manufacturing company’s stocks immediately declined. It then took a couple of years to ‘officially’ find out that this company was indeed guilty of the crash. And while exit polls in elections can sometimes differ very much from the truth, having a virtual stock market where people can bet on who they think will win almost always predicts the winner. Notice however, that betting on who will win does not necessary has to be equal to who one is going to vote for himself, a decision that can be very much influenced by social factors and thus violates the rule of independence 35 . The wisdom of crowds is both a highly overrated and a highly underrated phenomenon. It is overrated by supporters of the theory, who tend to view it as a new route towards mass- intelligence or collaborative innovation and by opponents of the theory who fear the theory to be an excuse for exaggerated forms of populism. It is however underrated by those who are indifferent and point out the fact that it is not a theory of ‘wisdom’ but just the application of a statistical principle. Essentially they are right; the wisdom of crowds is merely a combination between the law of large numbers and the idea of a large group of people in which every individual has a piece of the puzzle. In all of the examples mentioned above, we see this in effect. Jar guessing is plain statistics. Horserace betting is mostly statistics and a little bit of ‘solving the information puzzle’ and this is the other way around in the space shuttle example. However, while we in fact have two types of crowd wisdom, one being collective guessing and the other being collective correction on the basis of little bits of information, when combined in an interactive mass medium the wisdom of crowds becomes usable. Not because the crowd is good at providing new information, but because through collective guessing and mutual correcting they crowd is good at selecting from a set of alternatives. When applied to journalism, it means that while we do not always exactly know what we individually think is important, we do a pretty good job collectively selecting what is relevant and/or true. This is done explicitly through systems like Digg and Del.icio.us or 35 Surowiecki 2004 28
  • 30. implicitly by adding specific tags of linking to an article on our own website, so that the algorithms of Google or Technorati take effect. The reversed order of publishing, then selecting, has pretty large effects on the way citizens and journalists interact. Because of the huge amounts of data online, some of which is plain false, for a piece of information to prevail as relevant and true is had to be embedded in three ways in a set of external sources that have mutual links with the piece of information at hand. First, other publications or well-read listing have to point a link to it. In that way the piece gains authority on the basis of other peoples votes. Second, the author has to point from the original article (and this goes for both professional and amateur journalists) to other stories that he finds are equally good, in that way actively embedding his publication in a certain preferred context. Third, he has to point to as much of his original sources as he can to make his statement as transparent as possible. If he does not do it someone else will, since so much information is publicly available. 3.3.2 THE ROLE OF INDIVIDUAL EXPERTS Against this argument, one could argue: “But is selection and embedding (whereby providing context) not one of the main tasks of a journalist?”. I think it indeed is and will always be that way to a certain extend. Journalists are often better in selecting which sources are relevant than most of individual people in the population, because they are trained to do so and have a bigger network. And they are better in providing context, because they usually do not write a single article on a single subject or a single event, but do research and in doing so they keep tracking the developments in a certain field. However, this does not contradict with any of the above for two reasons. First of all, these journalists can find helpful allies in the relatively small group of people (but large in absolute numbers!) that have expert knowledge or have done thorough research. Second, as argued before, the ‘wisdom of crowds’ principle applies to choosing from a set of alternatives, not providing the alternatives. We still need intelligent, educated and concerned journalists and citizens to do research, collect data and write stories. But collectively, we the people are pretty good at selecting from already published content. Professional journalists as well as citizen journalists can use data, footage or articles from other journalist or citizen sources when conducting research. In fact, they always do. So in selecting what is true and relevant, journalists and citizens should also be able to tap into 29
  • 31. the intelligence of the online collective. Even when the original author of the publication has done his selection and has given a piece of information his context, it is to the individual reader or the collective of readers to choose from a set of selections and contexts, provided by a number of journalists as well as citizen sources. The flow of information has become transparent and as a result our ways of selecting from the pool of information have changed. 3.3.3 CONCEPTUAL TENSIONS: AUTHORITY AND TRANSPARENCY People doubt what journalists say. Not because the journalism conducted by traditional journalists is bad. Most of the traditional journalists do a pretty good and sometimes even outstanding job, aside from a few media scandals, which I will address in the next paragraph. People doubt because they can select from a set of alternatives and in that way gain insight into the bias of any individual journalist. So a journalist, if he wants to prove a point, has become dependent of the former audience to gain credibility. The faith of his story is in the hands of later users of that story, an important point I will thoroughly address in chapters five and six. A piece of journalistic information is no longer regarded as true or relevant just because it is published by a certain journalist with authority or in a certain newspaper or magazine with authority, but the crowd (aided by technology) forces journalism has become transparent, notwithstanding journalists who want to keep an elitist position or individuals who want to believe in media fairytales. This tension, between the concepts of authority and transparency, will form the second conceptual investigation at the end of this thesis. 3.4 COMMENTING ON THE NEWS The last level, on which a citizen can be involved in journalism, is as commentator on the news. This conversation should be interpreted both very concrete and in a more abstract way. On the surface, it looks as though the possibility to comment on journalistic outings has always been there. One could write a letter to the editor, send in an essay on the opinion page of a newspaper, call a radio station while they are broadcasting or simply react by no longer buying the newspaper or magazine and no longer viewing or listening to a certain program. In a web 2.0 environment, these possibilities just find their technically more advanced counterparts but are essentially nothing new. 30
  • 32. 3.4.1 JOURNALISM AS A CONVERSATION Gillmor describes five new ways in which this traditional conversation can take place. First of all, reporters can put their email address at the end of their stories, so the audience can respond. Second, media organizations can start online forums and mailing lists on which the staff itself is also part of the discussion. Third, editors can assemble and publish the best comments posted by readers while supplying context. Fourth, journalists can engage in live chats with their audience. And fifth, journalists can write their own weblog on which a dialogue can take place 36 . It are however not just these superficial outings of a conversation that are of main importance here. What really counts is the fact that because of the inherent openness of the new media, the audience demands a dialogue, whether the traditional media supplies the possibilities or not. If they do, you can come in contact with the author of the original piece and improve the quality of his work with your own input or comments. This way the traditional journalist, or whoever the writer of the original piece is, can put the knowledge and intelligence that exists among individuals in the crowd to good use. The larger the reacting crowd becomes, the higher the chances are that someone will provide a valuable reaction. From there, the original author can decide to use the comments to further enhance his own work. For example Pop Up, the book by Blanken and Deuze and We The Media by Dan Gillmor, both mentioned before, started out as an online open source enterprise, where the draft version was made public and the audience was invited to participate in writing the final version. If the traditional media do nevertheless not provide an official channel through which you can react, you can still express your thoughts. If you cannot react on a journalist’s weblog, you react on your own. If you think that a piece of investigative journalism is incorrect, you just gather your own facts through online sources and compose your own story. If you think the media have set the wrong agenda, you don’t call; you set your own agenda. If you think certain voices are missing from the dialogue, you add them. The big change is this: commenting on the news can be done outside of mass-media regulated channels, thus 36 Gillmor 2004 31
  • 33. classic mass-media journalists can assert less influence over the content and participants of the conversation. It is often said that journalists are the watchdogs of democracy. In this new world order, the public becomes the watchdog of journalism. The act of citizens commenting on the news has in the past also included the revealing of media scandals. Of the 55 important recent media scandals reported by Wikipedia in 2007, 50 happened after 1997 37 . In many of these, bloggers played a crucial role in discovering forgery, and manipulation38 . 3.4.2 CONCEPTUAL TENSIONS: INFORMATION AND CONVERSATION The effect of all this, is that the primary task of journalists changes (note that by saying ‘task’ we explicitly do not mean the goals and values of journalism as defined in paragraph 3.1). Journalism changes from gathering the facts and unilaterally providing a democracy with information, to shaping the conversation. And the journalist must accept his changing role from a teacher to a forum leader 39 . When done right, the possibilities are endless and have a certain utopian quality to them for people who believe in democracy by an informed citizenry. True conversations can start, not only between writers and readers, but also between journalists and citizens as both writers and readers at the same level. It is important to understand the difference: journalists must not only start a dialogue with society. In this way of seeing the conversation, things still revolve too much around the professional journalist. A true dialogue exists when journalists participate in the dialogue that society, of which they are a part, has with itself. This conceptual tension, between the communication models of information and conversation, is the base for the third and last conceptual investigation in the coming chapters. 37 Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purported_United_States_journalism_scandals 38 Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_scandal 39 Gillmor 2004 32
  • 34. 4. JOURNALISM IN ACTION In the previous two chapters, I have set the stage for a conceptual analysis of participatory journalism and the shifting roles of amateur journalists, professional journalists and others who are using the writeable web for the dissemination of journalistic information in the broadest sense. This has left us with a fairly flat and dry picture of participatory journalism. Although I have described some of the developments of and touched upon some of the issues arising in participatory journalism, I have not yet discussed in detail any of the concepts involved (objectivity, authenticity, authority, transparency, information and conversation). Nor have I lightened the stage with abstract notions that might further clarify the subject matter. In this chapter I will do just that. I will describe what participatory journalism is and how it functions, using Bruno Latour’s ‘In Action’-paradigm40 . Latour, a contemporary French philosopher, developed and used this paradigm to build a radical new philosophy of science. In this and the following chapter I will use some of his concepts to build a philosophy of participatory journalism. In the following paragraph I will provide a brief outline of the ‘In Action’-paradigm and some of the concepts that it constitutes: the concepts of controversy and collective and the distinctions between science in action and ready-made science and between the model of diffusion and the model of translation. Also, I will explain why I think this paradigm is now applicable to journalism and not just to science. 4.1 LATOUR’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE In 1987 the French philosopher Bruno Latour published his major work, called Science in Action. The main argument of this book is the following: there are two distinctive, consecutive stages in the development of scientific knowledge, which need different philosophical treatment. First there is the phase of producing the facts and machines of science, called science in action. The outcome of this process is then called ready-made science: the facts and machines of science themselves, accepted as such and usable in our daily life, in our speech, and in our subsequent research. 40 Latour 1987 33
  • 35. When we usually talk of scientific knowledge, we tend to talk about ready-made science. These are the facts of science one reads in textbooks; statements about the world that have been accepted as being uncontroversial. Examples of these are: “through photosynthesis, trees transform carbon-dioxide into oxygen”, “the earth is round and revolves around the sun” and “the structure of DNA is a double helix”. Technologies we use on a more or less daily basis, which have established their function over and over again, like computers, maps, camera’s etc. can also be called ready-made science. These facts are black boxes: sets of statements and technologies, so very much entangled that we do not bother opening them up. Latour explains these black boxes as follows: “No matter how controversial their history, how complex their inner workings, how large the commercial or academic networks that hold them in place, only their input and output count”41 . But this ready-made science is as said just the (current) end result of research. The point of closure, of black-boxing the facts, is preceded in time by the phase of science in action. Every fact of science starts out as a claim, its factuality eventually being a consequence of scientific action. It is thus possible to trace back every fact and artefact (something that has proven not to be a fact) of science to a time and place when the fact was still a controversial claim. We then speak of science in the making, instead of scientific knowledge. From there, one can examine how the initial claim was eventually transformed into a scientific fact or not. Also one can analyze claims that are still uncertain at the moment. We are entering this stage in the development of scientific knowledge when, for example, we talk about finding a cure for aids and cancer, fighting global warming, building smaller and faster computers or investigating ‘new’ elementary particles. Science in action can be characterized as the activity in which a fact-builder mobilizes42 many different actors to reaffirm his initial claims. The fact-builder is in this sense the scientist, or any other person who wishes to make a scientific claim. The actors can be human, like colleagues and other supporters who give weight to a claim, other scientists who cite the claim in later scientific publications or people that use the fact or machine in their scientific research or day-to-day business. They can also be non-human, such as other 41 Ibdem p. 3 42 Latour sometimes speaks of “enrolling” instead of “mobilizing”. For improved consistency, I will use the term “mobilizing”, except when explicitly quoting Latour. 34
  • 36. facts and theories, equipment, and machines. Eventually, we call a claim ‘a fact’ when it has been reaffirmed by such a large number of actors on such a large number of occasions, that its existence as such becomes accepted. The fact-builder has succeeded in embedding his claim in a network of associations, or what Latour calls a collective. When a previously accepted fact or an artefact of science is explicitly up for debate, or when two contradicting views exist on a certain scientific topic, we speak of a scientific controversy. For instance, the cause of global warming could be said to be a controversial topic. A controversy also occurs when scientific claims fail to reaffirm their quality in conjuncture with other black boxes or new scientific knowledge under construction, for example when new technology leads us to believe that the cause of a certain disease is genetic in stead of bacterial. And this is the stage we are thrown back into, when, for example, we are dealing with a space shuttle (a former black box) that suddenly explodes in space. This once uncontroversial technology becomes a controversial topic, as the fact ‘a space shuttle is a safe method of transportation’ is turned into nothing more than a claim from a few engineers; the dead astronauts claim otherwise. When a controversy is settled, the facts seem to have always been unproblematic and uncontroversial. It looks as though nature itself prompted the settlement, and as though the facts have always been out there, corresponding to a certain state-of-affairs in reality. This is how the philosophers of science of the past (before Latour) have always looked at scientific knowledge. One has to realize though, that while the controversy is still unsettled or the claims are still problematic, the facts of Nature are not just out there waiting to be discovered. The facts of Nature are the outcome of settling a controversy. So it is in the settlement of controversies, that we not only shape our views of nature and society, but also shape the facts of nature and society itself. In view of the above, we can never look strictly at the outside world alone to see if a statement is a fact. Both Nature and the methods of testing and interpreting it are consequences of the settlement of controversies. Consider this example: if you want to know something about a far away galaxy, you use a telescope. Based on what you see through the telescope, you develop a theory about the galaxy you are investigating. But, since you need the telescope to be able to see the galaxy, does what you see tell you 35
  • 37. something about the properties of the galaxy or the properties of the telescope? In other words, the means of testing and interpreting facts (the telescope) have been developed simultaneously with the development of the fact (the properties of the galaxy) itself. Of course there is a real galaxy out there; it is not a man-made fantasy. But its properties are not just there, waiting for us to discover them. They are a result of the acceptance of a certain arrangement of scientists, telescopes, publications and other allies needed to investigate these properties. Should both the facts and the instruments prove to be useful on many more separate and diverse occasions, their factuality slowly increases. If the galaxy looks the same through a different telescope, if its properties help explaining other cosmic events and if the telescope proves to be a useful tool in investigating other galaxies, claims about both the telescope and the galaxy gain strength. Eventually they might become black boxes, but this is established only through later uses of these facts and means of testing. Latour argues that a theory of science and thus a theory that has some degree of correspondence to the way science empirically works, must be focused on how a scientific claim becomes a usable fact or object in the process of settling the controversy: “The impossible task of opening the black box is made feasible (if not easy) by moving in time and space until one finds the controversial topic on which scientists and engineers are busy at work. […] our entry into science and technology will be trough the back door of science in the making, not through the more grandiose entrance of ready-made science” 43 . In order to develop a theory of science, one should analyze current controversies and realize that every scientific fact was once a controversy. From there, when one has permitted and equipped oneself to do so, one can start to look at the people and things that were involved in settling the controversy and the different roles that they played in relation to one another. As Latour writes in his “first principle”, which will prove to be an important asset to my theory of collective journalism: “The fate of facts and machines is in later users’ hands; their qualities are thus a consequence, not a cause, of a collective action” 44 . 43 Latour 1987: 4 44 Ibdem p. 259 36
  • 38. 4.2 FROM SCIENCE TO JOURNALISM There are striking parallels between some of the issues mentioned in Latour’s theory and some of the problems we have encountered earlier in this thesis. These parallels, explained below, lead us to think that by looking at journalism in the way that Latour looks at science and picking up some of the concepts involved, we will gain a better understanding of participatory journalism in the same way Latour himself gained a better understanding of science. We live in a rapidly changing society, in which both social and technical arrangements are being altered in various ways with far reaching consequences, as I described in chapters 2 and 3. We should, however, not separate the social from the technological, since the technologies which form our means of disentangling, explaining and mobilizing the world around us inherently shape what can be called Society and Nature; our view of the world and the way we live in it. We exert influence on all the non-human objects in the world, by developing them, putting them to use and providing them with relevance and agency, while at the same time these objects exert influence on us by enabling and constraining our actions. In this line of thinking, technologies are actors in themselves. Therefore there is no dualism in which we have society on one hand and technology on the other. In stead, society is made up of both human and non-human actors, which in their interaction define for themselves and each other what ‘society’ is. Journalists, who have to deal with all these changes, are themselves part of that society. That means that it is useless to put journalists on a proverbial island, separate the journalistic from the social, and then try to build a bridge between the island of the journalists and the mainland of society. Instead we have to accept that there are mutual interests between society and journalism as part of that society, and then study their mutual influence. The journalist is as much part of the society whose events he tries to report and explain, as the scientist is part of the world whose scientific laws he or she tries to uncover. Therefore, we have to examine a changing society, changing technologies and changing journalism together, as one coherent changing landscape. Make use of Latour, the best way of doing so is to look at the ways in which journalistic controversies get settled in this 37
  • 39. changing world. Because the settlement of controversies, journalistic and scientific, depends on both the people and the things that are made part of the controversy, we cannot but conclude that when we agree on the existence of changing technologies, changing journalistic techniques and changing journalistic actors, we have to accept new ways of settling journalistic controversies and thus a changing Journalism. Consequently, since an established news fact is only the outcome of settling a controversy, a different Journalism produces different news. Consider the following example, in analogy to the previous example of the galaxy and the telescope. Most of our political ‘galaxy’ is visible only through ‘telescopes’ like press conferences, official statements, regulated interviews, political journalists and the like. Almost all political news-facts are the result of the acceptance of the fact that these instruments and actors are able to provide us with useful news-facts. These instruments legitimize the facts and, in turn, these instruments are legitimized by the amount of facts they produce. Sometimes though, we are suddenly confronted with contradictory claims about our political reality. This happened, for instance, when a video showed up on Youtube in which US senator George Allen called an Afro-American campaign volunteer a ‘macaca’45 . The claim ‘George Allen is a racist’, which was the result of the appearance of the video on Youtube, directly contradicted the claim ‘George Allen is a decent guy’, which was the result of the carefully orchestrated journalistic arrangement through which we encountered George Allen before. The public gained insight into the properties of George Allen through new channels, as a result of which their knowledge of his properties changed from him being decent, to him being a racist. Because this showed us that the traditional journalistic arrangement lacked the instruments to produce certain facts (‘George Allen is a racist’), we had a reason to reconsider the instruments of the traditional journalistic arrangement causing or knowledge of both the ‘galaxy’ and the ‘telescope’ to change at the same time. 45 Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r90z0PMnKwI published on August 15, 2006 38
  • 40. 5. SETTLING JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES If one accepts that new technologies, and new relations between professionals and amateurs provide us with new means of settling controversies and thus new means of conduction journalism, one has to dive deeply into this process before redefining the foundations it rests upon. This is what I did in the first part of this thesis. I looked at the new technical arrangements that make a new journalism possible (chapter 2) and I looked at the new social arrangements in which this new journalism takes place (chapter 3). Then, in the previous chapter, I described a theory that can serve as a guideline in redefining the foundations of journalism. To do so, I will first examine 3 of Latour’s main concepts as they relate to journalism. In the concluding chapter of this thesis I can then try to solve the conceptual tensions, described in chapter 3. In paragraph 5.1 I will examine Latour’s concept of controversy in relation to journalism. I will first argue that controversial issues in journalism can be analyzed in the same fashion as controversial issues in science; an enterprise that is in and of itself different from analyzing well-established facts. Furthermore, I will argue that since citizens are getting involved in journalism, the fundamental fact that journalism deals with controversies becomes more manifest. In paragraph 5.2 I will look at Latour’s model of translation and its contrast with the model of diffusion. I will argue that adapting Latour’s concept of translation, and therefore taking a different perspective on the way the news is brought to the public, would solve a lot of the mutual mistrust between journalists and citizens. In paragraph 5.3, I will look at Latour’s concept of the collective, and the specific notion of factbuilding he derived from it. I will argue that adapting this notion results in a theory of collective production of knowledge that can help to adequately evaluate the role of citizens in journalism. Furthermore, from this new theory additionally arises a possibility to put the intrinsic link structure of the web to greater use. 5.1 JOURNALISM AS SETTLING JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES The process of journalism resembles the development of scientific knowledge. The types of actors that have to be mobilized to turn a scientific claim into a fact do not differ very much from the types of actors involved in doing so for journalistic claims. Journalists, like scientists, have to do research in which they mobilize both human and non-human actors. It is possible for a journalist to use black-boxed information (i.e. referring to previously 39
  • 41. published facts) or technology (i.e. a photo camera) to establish his claim more firmly, like it is possible for scientists to build on black-boxed theory or use scientific machinery (i.e. a telescope). Also both in science and journalism, people judge and comment on each other’s work as a system of peer review. In short, the activity of journalism is, just like science, about settling controversies, and the ways of doing so are alike. Like in science, a journalistic fact is not a fact until it has been reaffirmed by a multitude of actors and a journalistic artefact is not an artefact until someone else has mobilized a stronger set of actors that seem to reaffirm a contradictory claim. 5.1.1 WHAT ARE JOURNALISTIC CONTROVERSIES? Just like science, journalism also potentially produces ‘ready-made’ facts. These are the facts that are the end result of a journalistic endeavor and eventually turn up in historical textbooks. These are the facts that can be quoted or mobilized by another journalist, in another place, at another point in time to build new claims upon. Yet in science it is easier than in journalism to be distracted by the uncontroversial facts and the texts that express them, as was the case with many philosophers of science from the past according to Latour. For most people, when they learn about the settlement of a scientific controversy, the scientific activity is something that has happened in the past. Only the end results of research, the black boxes of ready-made science, are being used by people every day, or being taught at school. Scientists successfully engage themselves in the business of settling controversies, of building facts and machines, one could say. Many people use a calculator, a certain medicine or the laws of gravity without ever questioning their uncontroversial nature. So apart from a few scientific issues so controversial that we come in contact with them often, either through politics or journalism, such as stem-cell research, most people do not deal with science while it is still ‘in action’. Journalism is, in contrast, usually about events that are happening at present or have happened in the near past. The word ‘news’ has its origins in the word new. “Oh, but that is old news”, is what people say when something is not really current anymore. Most journalistic activity the public comes in contact with takes place when the claims are neither yet facts nor artefacts or when the subject matter is controversial. The main reason for this is that the process of resolving the controversies does not happen behind the 40
  • 42. closed doors of the laboratory. The general public is constantly informed by the immediate coverage of ‘newsworthy’ events and is thus confronted daily with contradictory claims through multiple media channels. This does not mean we do not hear straightforward things on the news, such as who won a certain election or who became world champion in a certain field of sports. This type of uncontroversial journalism is generally called ‘reporting’. Reporting produces the kind of ‘simple’ facts that, usually after they have been printed or broadcasted, become ready- made journalism. These facts pretty soon leave the domain of journalism and enter the realm of textbook history or encyclopedic knowledge. However, on most occasions, people expect from news media what is called ‘journalistic context’: an elaboration on the meaning of certain events. This is difficult however, since we cannot ask any single journalist to find the facts on his or her own simply because the facts are not out there waiting for him or her. As argued, the facts are produced within a journalistic collective. Economic, political and cultural realities demand from this collective a steady stream of news ‘facts’. Therefore, the public is confronted with journalism in action most of the time they are consuming news. Early 2002, the first reports appeared that the United States government was planning on invading Iraq. The main given reasons given to do so, were the claims that Saddam Hoessein’s regime was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and that he had ties with terrorist organization Al-Qaeda. In the following period, the US government tried to build a collective around these claims. They did intelligence research, collected evidence from satellite pictures and eyewitness reports and literally tried to build a collective of allies who supported the claim. At the same time, this information was disseminated to the general public through mass media channels. So when the war formally started, on March 20th 2003, it was a fairly established fact that the Iraqi people needed to be ‘liberated’ from their regime with terrorist ties. Now, more than four years later, a contradictory set of claims has become more factual. The claims “there are no weapons of mass destruction” and “Saddam did not have ties with Al- Qaeda” gain strength for everyday that these weapons and ties are not found. And the 41