Success or failure is irrelevant – independent citizen journalism is unsustainable

The good old days of Fleet Street, where journalists spent afternoons nursing a hangover from their liquid lunch and boasting about their ability to avoid putting pen to paper, are well and truley over. And about time too to be honest.

These days the journalist is expected to be a jack of all trades. Not only by providing more content, but by being involved with the entire production process of a story. Often they are writer, photographer, sub editor and SCO-er on numerous stories a day.

Learning these skills is neccessary to streamline the production process in the fast moving world of news websites, but the integrity of the reporter is still essentially maintained.

The story is still the centre around which these new skills revolve.

For the citizen journalist this quid pro quo is manifestly unfeasible in the long term. How can someone with no support network around them ensure the story remains at the heart of their operations? If unsuccessful (and by that I mean unprofitable) the citizen journalist has no wage and journalism becomes  merely a passion, not a career, fitted awkwardly around bar shifts or a release at the end of a soul destroying 9-5.

Yet with success the challenges increase. The bigger the operation grows the more it will demand diversification and innovation – and those things demand time. As soon as a website grows stories must begin to be delegated and reponsibilities of the day to day running of the website, which has much more to do with advertising, marketing and web based development than any actual journalism will leave no time to write.

The danger then is that you are not a journalist you are a web developer. Probably a disaffected not particularly good one.

A successful society is based on a separation of skills. You don’t ask your plumber to write you a sonnet because the likelihood is you’ll end up with a leaking toilet and a shoddy sonnet.

That’s not to say some plumbers are not great poets, just that theres a good reason it’s not a requirement of the job.

In the same way this idea of convergence of news constantly being touted to young journalists is unsustainable simply because the skills sets are too diverse. Sure there may be a whizz kid here and there who is at home in FTP as she is in a press conference, but it’s a unrealistic expectation of the wider profession.

Already the best citizen journalist ventures are being harnessed or absorbed into more traditional news organizations, MSNBC picked up Newsvine back in 2007 while The Guardian hired three local beat bloggers for what PaidContent described as “properly paid positions” to cover Edinburgh, Leeds and Cardiff. The alternative for those who can make money is that they develop their project using strikingly similar business models to the larger news organizations. The Huffington Post started as a small blog run by 6 people. It now has a staff of over 50 and is based in the high-ceilinged offices of an ex-Soho art gallery. It is also now the most linked to blog on the internet.

Politico is another US example of success forcing citizen journalists back into the traditional media business model. Initially a blog started by journalists who felt the politics the politics of Capitol Hill was being neglected by the Washington Post it now produces a print edition alongside it’s online coverage that is distributed across Washington DC – the site is run by web developers, the paper is printed at a printers and the stories are written by political journalists. I’ll bet their taps are fixed by plumbers too.

Even a Carter-Ruck gag is redundant in the twittosphere

The Guardian gagging by libel firm Carter-Ruck is a perfect example of the power mass dissemination, democratisation and consumption of news. It is also an unfortunate example of how ‘traditional’ news organisations are failing to embrace the revolution this represents.

The guardian said this in the Monday’s Media Guardian:

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations

By the next morning Trafigura was the number 1 trending topic on Twitter – literally the entire ‘twitosphere’ was discussing it. 

And who do you think Trafigura is? Have a look at this afternoon’s guardian.co.uk post by David Leigh:

The existence of a previously secret injunction against the media by oil traders Trafigura can now be revealed.

Within the past hour Trafigura’s legal firm, Carter-Ruck, has withdrawn its opposition to the Guardian reporting proceedings in parliament that revealed its existence.

Labour MP Paul Farrelly put down a question yesterday to the justice secretary, Jack Straw. It asked about the injunction obtained by “Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton Report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura”.

It was both the power that the appetite for the truth behind the gagged headline and the immunity from the notorious British Libel that the sheer numbers on twitter provided that enabled those who wanted to read and discuss the news to, well, read the news.

But they also created the news by commenting on and developing it as they tweeted, blogged and facebooked the story across the world. As Paul Canning has shown, even google maps are not immune from the information revolution: 

I was particularly tickled by this someone proporting to be ‘Trafigura’s board of the directors’ posted on the google map listing for Carter Ruck:

I retained carter ruck to serve an injunction on the british press to hide a certain indescretion with a boat, some africans and toxic waste. While initially they seemed competent, the resulting fallout (pardon the pun) has been nothing short of toxic. (there I go, punning again). We would have been better off with the “Where there is blame there is a claim” merchants they show during the ads on Jeremy Kyles show. In summary, not at all happy with the service

And yet, despite the internet being a-buzz with speculation, it took the BBC over 14 hours to begin their coverage of the story. It smacked not just of caution over libel risk but also of arrogance. ‘The people’ had decided the story and set the agenda and the traditional institutions were required to play catch-up. Channel four barely alludes to the issue on its main page news webpage

More 4 News (who, to be fair to them did cover the twitter angle quite interestingly) said it all:

(Twitter users) who, unfettered by legal constraints were able to score a victory over traditional media by publishing every last detail. It’s no wonder the bloggers are cock-a-hoop because although newspapers and TV are no longer banned from reporting on the parliamentary question, we still can’t talk about the contents of a confidential report by chemicals expert John Minton which is at the heart of the controversy.

Most traditional media outlets haven’t figured out how to work with new media in a remotely effective and, crucially, financially fruitful way and so it seems, they are jealous. The image presented of social networkers ‘cock-a-hoop,’ delighting in their victory just proves how complete their misunderstanding is. The people were engaging not attacking and a good journalist would seize on the interest not deride it.

Twitter is growing at a rate of 1382% a year (from Feb. 08 to Feb. 09) while More 4 News and Channel Four’s news at noon are no more as of the New Year.