This House Regrets the Rise of Citizen Journalism. Content

LBRT: This house regrets the rise of citizen journalism.

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ARTICLE 1 THE RISE OF CITIZEN JOURNALISM From live blogs on 'Occupy' protests to footage of Syrian atrocities on YouTube, filmmakers now have access to a wealth of raw material but can it all be trusted? June 11, 2012

In a digital world with a whole host of different ways to communicate a factual message it is increasingly hard to judge the value of amateur eyewitness film shot on a mobile phone and posted on the internet against a considered, observational documentary broadcast on a traditional television channel.

From the Occupy New York City bloggers, such as Tim Pool who has broadcast hours and hours of live reports from Zucotti Park in the city, to YouTube videos of citizens under fire from government forces in Syria these incidents and more are changing the landscape of documentary filmmaking. This has been made possible by the technology they use, the distribution platforms that are now available and the passion of ordinary men and women to tell the kinds of extraordinary stories that were once the domain of professional documentary makers.

Factual filmmaking has in some senses become hostage to these new, "immediate" technologies. But many working in the genre praise the developments for adding a richer dimension to current affairs and factual documentaries and everyone seems to agree that the genre will never be the same again.

"Phone cameras and internet video must threaten broadcasters who think TV viewers will move away from them (and on to the web), but the collective arena is a hive of creativity," says documentary pioneer Molly Dineen. "It should add to what traditional documentary makers are doing and not take away."

Roger Graef, award-winning filmmaker and founder of Films of Record, talks with enthusiasm about being able to source and use footage from social networks and YouTube to supplement what he shoots himself. In his film The Trouble with Pirates for Channel 4, Graef used "home video" footage shot by pirates and captives, material that he "wouldn't have gotten any other way" and that he says "made the film". But he also underlines the risks. "There are two big downsides to 'found' video: the first is provenance; it takes money and time to check that it is real and not faked; the second risk is that just because you can shoot on a

UKTV's general manager factual, Adrian Wills, says citizen journalists' footage and social media doesn't impact his programming but he concedes it is an increasingly important marketing tool. "Natural history and science is, I think, a different beast completely from current affairs programmes. Digital activity has found traction in reaction to news events and for live especially. I think for us the digital stuff is really about amplification around what we are doing already."

But current affairs is clearly benefiting from citizen journalism and video testimony from ordinary citizens. "Social networks are opening up whole new vistas for documentary filmmakers," enthuses Chris Shaw, editorial director ITN Productions. "You can make the most amazing films using content from social networks, sometimes with the permission and sometimes without the permission of the people who shot them."

Shaw says that ITN's documentary, Syria's Torture Machine, for Channel 4, drew on about 30,000 clips that have been uploaded on various social network sites, including "trophy videos" from Syrian military torturers and footage from local families and citizens caught up in demonstrations. "I think there is a sense that objective journalism is not the same as trawling social networks for citizen reportage and imagery, but there are two problems with that view," says Shaw. "First there are places like Syria where journalists haven't been able to go and second there is an extraordinary resource on social networks for current affairs, even though we have to take extraordinary caution to verify what we use."

In Shaw's view, the way forward is to mix "citizen video" with professionally shot footage to come up with a more rounded picture. "It's a whole new force of amazing, raw and close-to-the action footage and there is a lot more of it," says Shaw. "In the old days we would find one image of someone's feet being beaten with a cable, but now we get 20 of them. Although it is disturbing, we can begin to see patterns and to build a better picture of the scale of abuse and that has got to be a good thing for the film."

"The new technologies certainly open up new possibilities for filmmaking", says Jeff Deutchman, whose documentary of the day after Barak Obama was elected US president called 11/4/08 used crowd- sourced footage. "What's interesting about what I did is that it is fundamentally oppositional not only to traditional documentaries but

LearningLeaders – All Rights Reserved - 8/2/17 3 also to traditional ideas of filmmaking that most of us have internalised, like filmmaking is about a top-down structure where the director is in control. But the truth is there is something really interesting about the level of democracy involved in using crowd-sourced footage."

Deutchman, who also is director of acquisitions and productions for Sundance Selects/IFC Films, thinks that there are even more radical things to come as people figure out how to use the technology available to create new and different things. "I don't know if all this experimentation will lead to better films, but I do think they can be extended to get some truly radical process like where users are able to edit their own films perhaps. I think there is much more to explore."

BY: Kate Bulkley

SOURCE: The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/jun/11/rise-of-citizen- journalism

ARTICLE 2 NEW SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS EMPOWER CITIZEN JOURNALISM July 17, 2016

It may be inside a protest rally, or in front of a deadly shooting. Smartphones, video and social media are empowering citizens to tell their stories like never before.

This became clear with the live video earlier this month from Diamond Reynolds when she captured the aftermath of the shooting by a police officer of her boyfriend Philando Castile in Minnesota and streamed it live on Facebook.

The unprecedented live feed was just the latest in a series of events highlighting the power of citizen journalists to bring to light events and viewpoints that would otherwise not be part of mainstream media.

Citizen journalism has been around for centuries, but each technological advance has made it easier to reach more people, said Valerie Belair- Gagnon, who heads the Yale University Information Society Project and is an incoming professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota.

Prominent examples from the past include the 1963 Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination and the 1991 beating by Los Angeles police of Rodney King and the events of the Arab Spring.

More recently, citizen videos offered immediate and intimate perspectives from Thursday's truck attack in the southern French city of Nice and the 2015 rampage in Paris, as well as dozens of citizen confrontations with police in the United States.

"In each case, a new technology prompted us to be aware that citizens can contribute journalism in certain ways," Belair-Gagnon said.

"In the shift we are seeing since 2004, citizen media is becoming fully integrated to journalism."

Belair-Gagnon said the rise of citizen journalism is not necessarily negative for the mainstream media.

"For me, it's a positive story because journalists are not the only gatekeepers," she told AFP.

"The fact that the public or citizens are able to gather information and distribute it to the public provides an opportunity for richer storytelling."

Democratizing media

Jeff Achen, executive editor of the Minnesota nonprofit group The UpTake, which trains citizen journalists, said the latest incidents show a "democratization" of the news media.

"Media can't be everywhere, but there is something with a citizen telling their own story from their own perspective which can be very valuable." Achen, a former television and print report, said citizen journalism won't necessarily replace traditional media but may augment it.

"With the legacy media, some of the news can feel manufactured and manipulated. It can feel corporate sponsored," he said.

Citizens can enhance journalism's traditional role of holding powerful institutions like the police accountable.

Platforms such as Twitter's Periscope and Facebook Live, which allow anyone to broadcast an event, can create "excitement" in this effort, said Achen.

"I think this will become more prevalent," he added.

"Everyone is going to make it routine. They will take out their cellphones whenever a police officer pulls over and does something" to bear witness to the facts, Achen said.

Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the ability for citizens to reach the masses can help drive social change.

"Powerful as these videos are for mobilizing activists, they may be more powerful in bringing new participants into the racial justice movement," he said in a blog post.

Change accelerating

Dan Gillmor, an Arizona State University professor and author of a book on citizen journalism, said Reynolds "changed our perception of media"

Gillmor said the Reynolds video was not necessarily something new but showed "the velocity of change is accelerating" in citizen news production. "Her video was a three-faceted act: witnessing, activism and journalism," Gillmor said in a blog post.

"Even though few people saw it in real time, she was saving it to the data cloud in real time, creating and one hopes preserving a record of what may or may not be judged eventually to have been a crime by a police officer. What Reynolds did was brave, and important for all kinds of reasons."

Gillmor said Reynolds "taught the rest of us something vital: We all have an obligation to witness and record some things even if we are not directly part of what's happening."

These events also raise questions about how platforms such as Facebook respond to their role as conduits for citizen journalism. Facebook's role came into question when it briefly took down Reynolds video, before restoring it.

Gillmor and others argue that the event underscores that Facebook is part of the news industry, despite its claim to be a neutral platform.

"Facebook hasn't given a plausible explanation for its initial removal of Reynolds' video," Gillmor said.

"The point is that the video remains visible because Facebook allows it to be visible."

Gillmor added that it is "enormously dangerous that an enormously powerful enterprise can decide what free speech will be. I don't want a few people's whims in Menlo Park overruling the First Amendment and other free speech 'guarantees.'"

BY: Phys.org

SOURCE: https://phys.org/news/2016-07-social-media-tools-empower- citizen.html#jCp

ARTICLE 3 PRIZE-WINNING CHINESE CITIZEN JOURNALISM WEBSITE STILL GOING STRONG DESPITE SUPPRESSION November 12, 2016

Despite the continued detention of his reporters and having been imprisoned twice, the founder of the 64 Tianwang citizen news site says suppression will help the organisation grow.

Reporters Without Borders on Monday awarded its Press Freedom Prize to 64 Tianwang, which is widely recognised as the first rights defence website in China.

In 1998, 64 Tianwang started out under a different name as an organisation that focused on human trafficking, which Tianwang

The site was established the next year. Huang Qi, a Sichuan resident, founded the project with money from his previous career as a businessman and factory owner.

their loved ones or who had gone missing, we discovered that in the mainland, behind these cases were judicial corruption or human rights

At the time, their work earned Tianwang positive coverage from attracted official disapproval for their reporting on human rights.

Now, Tianwang is an independent news site that posts articles and information about human rights incidents in China, including detentions by police, forced demolitions, petitioner activism and demonstrations.

Although the site is blocked in China, Huang thinks it is still reaching site is read by thousands of Chinese citizens, rights organisations, foreign media, and government officials and police some who are wary of the site reporting their misdeeds and others who are hoping for things to change.

Huang even stood up for the rights of disgraced official Zhou Yongkang, calling for the authorities to protect his rights and not to t in mainland China, everyone

Huang told HKFP before the Press Freedom award was announced that the award is a way to recognise the work of their volunteer citizen journalists. Nine of their citizen journalists are currently detained and five are on bail, according to Tianwang. Six Tianwang citizen journalists were detained for their coverage of the G20 summit in Hangzhou in September; one of them is still detained.

Since its founding, more than a thousand of its citizen journalists have been detained, said Huang. He was last detained for 24 hours at the end of October, as the Sixth Plenum convened in Beijing.

Despite the continued crackdown, Huang Qi and his volunteers have continued their work.

When asked if he was worried about increased suppression if Tianwang suppression is a necessary condition to help us grow and help us

He told state media in 1999 that Tianwang would become a media organisation on par with outlets like the Washington Post, the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and CNN.

standard is still very poor, because we have poor material conditions and we constantly meet with suppression. But in the future, we will

Huang was previously jailed for five years for subversion in 2003 after hosting on his site articles about the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China that resulted in the Tiananmen massacre. He was again jailed for

towards democrac

optimistic to some, maybe, unreasonably so. Huang insists that the human rights situation is improving in China if viewed in the context of wider trends as opposed to individual cases, even though human rights organisations have said that the situation is deteriorating under current president Xi Jinping.

at worst in eight or ten years

BY: Catherine Lai

SOURCE: The Hong Kong Free Press https://www.hongkongfp.com/2016/11/12/interview-prize-winning- chinese-citizen-journalism-website-still-going-strong-despite- suppression/

ARTICLE 4 THE RISE AND FALL OF CITIZEN JOURNALISM May 14, 2014

A woman passing a serious car accident snaps a smartphone picture and posts it on her Facebook chat site with the caption, 'bingle on the highway, hope everyone is okay'.

Less than an hour later, 20 people have liked the post, 40 have shared it and there are 11 comments.

As traditional news platforms adjust, the lightning fast networks of social media have become the new town grapevines.

In Mount Gambier, 25-year-old Josh Lynagh has his smartphone constantly at hand receiving emergency service updates and Google alerts about anything happening in South Australia's South East.

Murder charges, lost pets, reports of house fires and local events are all posted on his Limestone Coast Community News Facebook page, of which he is the sole administrator.

There are 8,300 people following the page, more than a third of Mount Gambier's population.

By comparison, Mount Gambier newspaper The Border Watch has 4,500 followers on its page and ABC South East SA has just over 2,000.

Mr Lynagh describes the page's popularity as 'mind-blowing', saying he originally set up the site just a year ago to report local police news.

"I've always had a real interest in the community and what's going on.

"I would just post the SAPOL (SA police) Limestone Coast page updates...from then I started doing fire or severe weather warnings and I started getting people messaging me about community events.

"A lot of people like to go to one site and be kept in the loop on their Facebook - it's a huge platform for the community."

Although Mr Lynagh said he receives a lot of positive feedback, he has also had to deal with community members angry and upset about his posts.

"If I post a news story up there from SAPOL, some people get very upset or emotional," he says.

"I've had people threaten me through comments or messages to the page... that's the risk in putting yourself out there publicly.

"But if it's something I think the community needs to know about I put it up."

Mr Lynagh admits he has fielded heavy criticism from people saying 'you're not a journalist' and it has been a steep learning curve when it comes to posting what and when.

"I'm literally just a guy who is very interested in the community and what's going on," he says.

Risk of trusting social media 'reporting'

Citizen journalists' are beginning to make their presence felt in the new media landscape, says Dr Vincent O'Donnell, a Media Commentator from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

But he warnes there is a danger to the everyday person trying to emulate a news journalist.

After reading posts on Mr Lynagh's site yesterday, Dr O'Donnell says the page 'has the presentation of a legitimate news site but was presenting gossip, not news'.

"Simply listing uncorroborated statements about events which may or may have happened is not fulfilling the role of a modern media site."

"It's a bit like sitting in a town square on market day and all the old gossips are there competing to tell stories - a lot of the new media are like that."

He says a simple post could be recorded forever in cyberspace, in some cases destroying reputations and lives or causing distress to those involved.

"A small lie can lay in waiting for an innocent party forever." In worst case scenarios, posts or pages can be defamatory or might jeopardise court cases, such as in the case of the murder of Melbourne woman Jill Meagher.

More recently, a fake Twitter account purporting to be CNN host Piers Morgan tweeted news of Nelson Mandela's death, four months before he died in December 2013.

The news was re-tweeted 1300 times before a news organisation rang the hospital to verify the information.

Dr O'Donnell says there was a growing interrelationship between social media and news in a highly competitive news climate.

It is common to see 'Did you see something?' or 'Tweet us a picture' in a news story and more and more journalists are using social media as a tool to add to their stories.

"A tweet can only ever contain a fraction of the whole story and to judge the whole story by 140 characters long is to say you can understand the story of Christianity by reading the front page of the bible."

Dr O'Donnell likens the current level of social media saturation in today's society to 'Pandora's box', saying it was evolving much faster than current ethical standards and laws.

Dr O'Donnell says the danger of social media pages such as Limestone Coast Community News, is there is no way the reader is able to cross- check for unsubstantiated information.

"Too many media outlets put too high a value on being first with a story and too low a value on being right with the story.

"The traditional media still have to safeguard their reputation for striving for some degree of accuracy and reliability when it comes to social media."

The loss of commercial regional television news broadcaster from the South East in 2013, may have led people to believe 'I can fill that gap' says Dr O'Donnell.

"There is a market for citizen journalists, but they have to build a reputation slowly."

"Journalism is the exercise of an enquiring mind within an ethical framework."

Police monitoring sites

Manager of the Limestone Coast Crime Prevention Section, Sergeant Paul Scicluna said local police were working hard to promote safe internet use and it was the administrator's responsibility to monitor what was posted.

He said the first port of call for someone unhappy about what was being reported on social media was to complain to Facebook directly.

"On occasion, local police would investigate where people had been threatened, abused or humiliated on any page.

"The investigation will include looking at the actions of the administrator, if that person can be identified," he said.

"When police receive complaints from members of the public about groups we encourage them to use the report function and also report groups themselves.

"This action has seen several offensive pages removed locally in the past year alone."

Josh Lynagh admits that sometimes adding his own commentary to news stories has landed him in hot water with followers.

Several of his followers have taken him to task including Mount Gambier resident Jo Clement who told him via the page, 'you need to own your own comments and expect the backlash'.

He also admits that he has sometimes failed to attribute news posts garnered from legitimate news organisations, but is now making sure he gives credit to his sources.

My Lynagh says it is the negative news that gets the most attention, a good news post about a missing dog being found holds the record for the most popular post.

These community posts are the most satisfying for Mr Lynagh, when the community draws together, whether it's to find a missing pet or help out local musicians.

"I've never seen a missing dog turn into such a campaign - the whole community was aware of this dog and they were so happy."

BY: Kate Hill

SOURCE: ABC http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2014/05/14/4004510.htm

ARTICLE 5 HOW CITIZEN JOURNALISM CAN LEAD TO CYBER BULLYING June 14, 2016

Citizen journalism is often seen as more democratic form of journalism, where the public contributes to the reporting, analysis and dissemination of news. Sociologist and criminologist Agneta Mallén at Lund University in Sweden has studied the phenomenon and shown some of its downsides, including how it sometimes leads to outright cyber bullying.

In recent years, citizen journalism has become a widely known phenomenon. It involves ordinary citizens witnessing events, documenting them on their mobile phones and sharing them on social media. It has become an increasingly important news source that often sets the tone of how an event is perceived by the world.

"Common within this type of citizen journalism is that it is perceived as truth to at least the same extent as ordinary journalism," says Agneta Mallén.

She argues that the credibility is enhanced by the often poor film quality and shaky image, giving the viewer a high sense of presence, allowing them to become less critical of the source.

"Another problem with citizen journalism is that it opens the door to cyber bullying," says Agneta Mallén.

In a recently published study, she has analysed a video clip that circulated a few years ago under the name "Crazy Granny," which shows an elderly woman who looks as if she is trying to sneak away without paying for her taxi fare. The clip has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, and in hundreds of comments the woman is defamed and ridiculed.

"The comments against the old lady were extremely harsh. Many of them were sexist and encouraged violence. Furthermore, from the comments it was possible to determine the woman's identity and address," says Agneta Mallén.

Agneta Mallén read the taxi driver's police report against the woman and got a completely different story than the one told in the video clip. It turned out that the woman was not at all trying to avoid paying for

LearningLeaders – All Rights Reserved - 8/2/17 16 her taxi fare, but rather the conflict was about her accidentally spilling on the seat of the taxi, and the fact that the driver wanted her to pay damages before letting her leave. The police classified it as an accident and immediately closed the preliminary investigation.

"But the damage was already done. The woman had already been humiliated in a massive cyber bullying campaign, and never received any redress. The woman was subjected to a virtual punishment for something she did not do. The behaviour is very similar to the medieval pillory where the sentence entailed being mocked in public," says Agneta Mallén, who thinks it is important to discuss the downsides to citizen journalism.

"Video clips filmed with a mobile phone can help police solve crimes and are increasingly used as evidence in trials. However, it is important to realise that these videos only show part of the truth and that the person being filmed does not have any say on the material before it is published online," says Mallén.

BY: Lund University

SOURCE: Science Daily https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160614084218.htm

ARTICLE 6 RACIST CITIZEN JOURNALIST VIDEOS SPARK OUTRAGE IN TAIWAN June 10, 2016

A controversy over a video targeting an elderly Mainlander in Kaohsiung put a damper on the Dragon Boat Festival on Friday and reopened the always touchy debate on race and citizenship in Taiwan.

The clip, posted on Facebook on Thursday by Hung Su-chu (洪素珠), a contributor to the People Post (PeoPo) citizen journalist platform operated by Public Television Service (PTS), shows Hung chasing an elderly Mainlander man at the 228 Memorial Park in the southern port city.

Off screen, Hung asks the man why he came to Taiwan. The man responds that he came in 1950 with his parents. Hung then starts yelling at the Chinese man and accuses Mainlanders of living off the Taiwanese.

Hung is reportedly a member of the Taiwan Civil Government, a stridently anti-China and altogether fringe organization that advocates for Taiwan becoming part of the U.S. (TCG now denies she is affiliated with them). She also volunteers at schools in Kaohsiung, and is people on earth for giving

The criticism leveled at Hung has been loud, and prosecutors have called for an investigation. The Tsai administration has also condemned

President Tsai reposted the reaction of Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), the chairperson of the opposition Kuomintang (KMT), to the scandal, which shows the extent of the agreement across the political spectrum regarding opposition to such ideology. Hung Su- par with, and certainly no more acceptable than, that of Zhang Xiuye (張秀葉), the pro-unification woman who has been harassing, and

o has been picked up by the Chinese social media platform Weibo, where her targeting of Mainlanders has been portrayed as an accurate example of the type of harassment that ethnic Chinese face at the hands of the independence completely out-of- who are looking for arguments to pick a fight with Taiwan, this is the perfect gift (worryingly, this reminds me of the allegations that ethnic Russians in Ukraine and Crimea were being persecuted by ultra- nationalists, which Moscow used as justification to intervene militarily).

Such archaic and divisive politics were laid to rest with the advent of the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan, which found its roots in a

Remarks of this nature have no place in multiethnic Taiwan; regardless of th

It is harassment and outright discrimination. Most of the Mainlanders who came to Taiwan after 1949 had no choice; first it was a matter of survival, and over the decades they became participants in the extraordinary experiment that is Taiwan.

therefore has no claim to free speech.

The old wounds of ethnicity should not be reopened, not in this age. Taiwanese society must come together and use this incident to clearly state that discrimination will not be countenanced. PTS should also close her account with them, and Hung should be barred from addressing children in the classroom. Young minds should not be polluted with such bigotry.

BY: J. Michael Cole

SOURCE: The News Lens https://international.thenewslens.com/article/41750

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

1. The Rise Of Citizen Journalism http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-rise-of-citizen-journalism/

2. Professional and Citizen Journalism in the Age of Fake News https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/2/19/1635557/-Professional- and-Citizen-Journalism-in-the-Age-of-Fake-News

3. Why We Need Quality Citizen Journalism More Than Ever http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/adam-manuel/citizen- journalism_b_16406412.html

4. Citizen Journalism: A Recipe for Disaster http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0912/citizen-journalism-a-recipe-for- disaster.html

5. Worse http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/10/citizen-journalism-is-a- catastrophe-itll-only-get-worse.html

6. Value of citizen journalism http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2008/01/value_of_citizen_jour nalism.html