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.