The debate about citizen journalists, professionalism, ethics and safety rumbles on. In today’s Guardian former Daily Mirror editor, and journalism professor Roy Greenslade, asks what are journalists for in the age of the internet? Picking up on the debate about citizen-journalism he suggests that unlike some professions, journalism has few barriers to entry.
“One restriction under persistent attack is "professionalism", the notion that a job (a profession) entails lengthy and sophisticated training that closes it off to "ordinary" mortals. This may well continue to be true of medicine and the law - though both have had to adapt in the face of the modern democratic spirit - but it has never carried much weight in journalism. It has long been the case, especially since the National Union of Journalists lost its 1970s battle for a closed shop, that untrained people have walked into jobs in newspapers and broadcasting.
Now, with the internet, there has been a further step-change in what it means to be a journalist because the old media organisations, especially newspapers, cannot regulate entry. Indeed, they are now desperately playing catch-up, trying to cope with the net's apparently limitless possibilities.”
He argues that while blogs and moblogs provide a welter of material online, it is the journalists job to make sense of it all – to add context and explanation, or edit the material into a form that is easy for readers and viewers to absorb.
He uses the two photographic sites to draw a comparison. flickr.com, representing the new age of information where people upload photographs and allow others to browse and draw their own conclusions. In the aftermath of the London bombings hundreds of people uploaded pictures for people to view. Scoopt represents the other extreme – acting as a middle man between citizen-journalists who’ve taken newsworthy pictures and the established big media – selling on the pictures.
No conclusion is drawn as to which is a more noble cause.
He concludes:
“What all this suggests is that despite the net providing people with a revolutionary way of becoming journalists, it does not answer the central dilemma of journalism itself: what is it for? Democratisation has burgeoned alongside the "free" market economy that encourages people to believe that everything, including information, has a price. Is that really so great an advance?””
Matt
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