CNN and Citizen Journalism in Network Culture

TVN14510.1177/152747641 2446487446487PalmerTelevision & New Media

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Television & New Media 14(5) 367–385 “iReporting” an © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permissions: Uprising: CNN and sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1527476412446487 Citizen Journalism in tvnm.sagepub.com Network Culture

Lindsay Palmer1

Abstract This essay examines the increasing interdependence of television news organizations and citizen journalism, specifically focusing on CNN’s citizen journalist website called iReport. Using Tiziana Terranova’s notion of “network culture,” I show how CNN simultaneously denigrates and depends on the unpaid labor of its iReporters, especially when covering a political uprising. I draw on a series of interviews conducted with iReporters who covered the Iranian elections and protests of 2009, in an effort to address the complex political imperatives that inspired their unpaid labor for CNN. In this sense, my case study ultimately reveals that citizen journalism is less a story of exploitation and more a story of negotiation, as hegemonic journalistic representations of world events ultimately unfold within the increasingly disruptive informational milieu that is the product of network culture.

Keywords CNN, iReport, citizen journalism, political uprisings, television news

In December 2010, CNN’s four-year-old citizen journalism website heralded the com- pletion of the Global Challenge, an assignment that invited “iReporters” to help CNN “cover the globe” by uploading images from “every single country.” The iReport site said that its new application for the mobile phone had made it “easier than ever to upload on the go.” CNN’s celebration of its iReporters’ mobility was supplemented on the site with the image of a world map, speckled with red dots indicating the nations

1UC Santa Barbara, Goleta, CA, USA

Corresponding Author: Lindsay Palmer, Department of Film and Media Studies, 2433 Social Sciences and Media Studies Building (SSMS), UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4010. Email: [email protected]

Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on April 8, 2015 368 Television & New Media 14(5) that iReporters had visited and captured on camera. A quick click of the cursor allowed the website’s visitors to zoom in on the map, following links to the iReporters’ photos. This interactive map, coupled with CNN’s inclusive rhetoric—“let’s cover the globe together”—gave the impression that the journalistic endeavor to map the world was now a collaboration between CNN employees and the network’s global public. CNN has long defined itself as a “unifying global force” possessing the ability to “tell the world about the world” (Küng-Shankleman 2000, 118-19). Media scholars trace this cartographic power back to the network’s pioneering use of satellite reporting during the Gulf War, which engendered an explosion of discourse about newer, more immediate ways of covering global conflict (Zelizer [1992] 1999). The sense of imme- diacy and proximity facilitated by satellite news reporting operated as a marketing tac- tic for the growing network, best exemplified in the early CNN motto “The sun comes up somewhere all the time” (Volkmer 1999). This motto assured viewers that the Cable News Network could bring every corner of the world into their living rooms. Yet, in the past few decades media conglomeration and the intensified commer- cialization of news has led to a growing amount of newsroom lay-offs (Compton and Benedetti 2010). This has in turn led to a different set of strategies for mapping the world, with CNN increasingly seeking the involvement of citizen journalists working within diverse national and sociocultural contexts. Interestingly, CNN’s launch of the iReport website seems to coincide with an explosion of scholarly research dedicated to understanding citizen journalism in the age of the “prod-user” (Bruns 2008). Much has been said about the rise of the “blogosphere” in the past decade (Barlow 2007; Bruns 2008; Tremayne 2007), a phenomenon that Stuart Allan has attributed to the public discontent with traditional news since the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center (2006). Yet, unlike many amateur bloggers whose messages can sometimes only reach a limited number of people, iReporters draw on CNN’s clout to disseminate their messages across a wide variety of multimedia platforms. Their unpaid labor simultaneously bolsters the power of the CNN brand while also illuminating the social hierarchies long associated with traditional journalism, thus serving as an example of the increasingly “symbiotic relationship” between mainstream media and citizen journalists (Friend and Singer 2007). The citizen journalists’ disruption of such hierarchies cannot solely be attributed to the rise of digital technologies, though these technologies do indeed optimize the propagation of citizen messages (Allan and Thorsen 2009). Such disruption is also not merely a product of the commercial news crisis identified by Robert McChesney and John Nichols, though such a crisis exists (2011). Graeme Turner aligns the rise of the citizen journalist with a crisis in the credibility of professional news itself, as well as with the “ordinary” person’s effort at bridging the alienating gap between traditional journalism and its public (2010). Though many scholars still assert that professional journalism is the guardian of democracy (Papacharissi 2009), this guardianship is increasingly perceived as a failure, suggesting the need for what the more optimistic proponents of citizen journalism identify as media witnessing (Frosh and Pinchevski 2009; Gillmor 2004).

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Even so, there is reason for caution, especially in the case of the corporatized citizen journalism facilitated by iReport. As Lisa Parks asserts, the CNN brand has “the power to shape knowledge about and impact interventions into world affairs,” and such power must be reinvestigated as information technology changes (2009, 1, 10). This essay attempts such an investigation, deploying two specific methodologies: First, I offer a discourse analysis of the industry chatter addressing the 2006 launch of iReport, with the purpose of illuminating the profound anxiety inspired by CNN’s affiliation with citizen journalism. Second, I offer an analysis of the interviews I conducted with Global Challenge participants in 2010, as well as with iReporters who covered a very different story—the Iranian uprisings of 2009, spurred by the announce- ment of the reelection of presidential incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That event sparked demonstrations in and outside of Iran, with protesters claiming the elections had been rigged (Kamalipour 2010). I turn especially to iReport coverage of these occurrences in an effort to examine the possibilities and the dangers of the high visibility promised by CNN. I will show that the deployment of the CNN brand operated very differently for iReporters covering the Iranian uprisings than it did for the Global Challenge participants, raising questions about the distinct definitions of the words citizen and journalist in Iran (Sreberny and Khiabany 2010). Yet one thing that both types of coverage had in common was the fact that they were conducted by unpaid volunteers who were carefully distinguished from professionals. Accordingly, I apply the critical approaches articulated by Axel Bruns (2008), Mark Andrejevic (2007), and Tiziana Terranova (2004), in order to understand the complex labor of “iReporting” in network culture. Employing Terranova’s notion of the unpaid labor that is “shamelessly exploited” at the same time that it is “pleasurably embraced” (2004, 78), I examine the paradoxical assertions of the iReporters I interviewed, pointing to their willingness to volunteer for CNN without the monetary compensation awarded professional journalists. I also point to the professional industry’s denigration of its “amateur” counterparts, a denigration that I align with the anxious effort at maintaining the professional monopoly on meaning itself in an era where traditional journalism is indeed in crisis. The growing disruption of this monopoly on meaning is indebted to the increased “interconnectedness” of communication systems, an interconnectedness that leads to the formation of a complex “network culture”—a “meshwork of overlapping cultural formations, of hybrid rein- ventions, cross-pollinations, and singular variations” (Terranova 2004, 1-2). Crucially, Terranova asserts that this is an environment in which “media messages” flow not “from sender to receiver, but spread and interact, mix and mutate within a singular (and yet differentiated) informational plane” (2004, 2). Examining this network culture’s implications for both professional and citizen journalism, I focus on three topics: (1) the U.S. news industry’s anxious effort at maintaining its monopoly on meaning during the Iranian uprisings, while still exploiting citizen journalism as a resource, (2) the paradoxical status of iReporting as unpaid labor that, especially in the case of the Iranian protests, challenged dominant notions of value by privileging global visibility over monetary compensation, and (3) the perpetual

Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on April 8, 2015 370 Television & New Media 14(5) negotiation fundamental to interconnectedness, exemplified both in the instance of CNN’s soft control of the iReporters who attempted to shame the Nokia Siemens telecommunications company for helping the Iranian government track certain dem- onstrators, as well as in the instance of the iReporters using the CNN-sanctioned site as a space in which to publicly contest CNN’s efforts at silencing them. Rather than stopping at a lamentation of the tactics deployed against iReporters covering the Iranian uprisings, I also show how they manipulated the technologies available to them in order to share their political messages with a larger public. My interviews reveal that the iReporters’ desire to voice their competing interpretations of the events in Iran inspired their unpaid labor during the protests. Instead of focusing on monetary compensation or even on the minimal recognition promised to “star” iReporters, these particular iReporters eschewed recognition—something potentially dangerous for them—and instead sought the visibility of their opposition. This visibility was made possible through the iReporters’ communicative interconnectedness, the same interconnectedness that also facilitated their exploitation. My case study will examine this paradox, revealing that while sites like iReport do indeed exploit citizen labor to “extend the corporate hegemony of market-driven journalism” (Allan 2006, 122), citizen journalists are increasingly harnessing the clout of the corporations in order to flood the mediascape with competing interpretations of global conflict. In this sense, citizen journalism points to the existence of an informational milieu where fluctuation and variation confound the sender/receiver model of communication on which professional journalism depends (Terranova 2004, 5). Following this, my case study reveals that citizen coverage of global conflict is a story of both exploitation and subversion, since hegemonic journalistic representations of world events ultimately unfold within the increasingly disruptive informational milieu that is the product of network culture.

Mapping Industry Discourse To properly delineate the impact of network culture on the journalistic coverage of global conflict, it will first be necessary for me to examine the U.S. news industry’s anxious effort at maintaining its monopoly on meaning—on who gets to render which stories relevant and why. Especially in the context of CNN, this effort largely centers on the twin notions of credibility and validity, reserving professional credibility for paid journalists, as well as questioning the technological and conceptual validity of the images uploaded by amateur iReporters. Terranova argues that journalists’ obsession with credibility and validity is indicative of their dependence on the representational logic of signification, where meaning itself depends on a sender relaying particular signs to a receiver who is familiar with the sign system; this significatory logic in turn depends on a conceptualization of space that is based on perspective, where one subject addresses a separate subject across a three-dimensional distance (2004, 15-16). Professional journalism has long drawn on this notion of perspectival space, situating the supposedly “objective” perspective of paid anchors and reporters

Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on April 8, 2015 Palmer 371 as the reference point against which all other perspectives are measured—especially when these professional journalists are called to render global events intelligible for their audiences (Hall et al. [1978] 1999; Morse [1998] 2004). Yet, such perspectival space has imploded, disrupting the transparency of signs (Terranova 2004, 35, 37). Increasingly, space can be defined by its “excess of sensory data, a radical indeterminacy in our knowledge, and a nonlinear temporality involving a multiplicity of mutating variables and different intersecting levels of observation and interaction” (2004, 37). While signs still circulate across the mediascape, and while meaning can still be constructed and contested within this space, Terranova argues that meaning cannot exist outside of the much more complicated informational milieu that “exceeds and undermines the domain of meaning from all sides” (2004, 9). This is relevant because of the growing way in which communicative processes are linked to cultural processes—where cultural processes, like the citizen coverage of the Iranian opposition, are “increasingly grasped and conceived in terms of their informational dynamics” (2004, 7). Terranova’s philosophy complicates professional journalism’s obsession with objectivity, suggesting that experience itself exceeds all efforts at representation, including those “objective” efforts that citizen journalists supposedly cannot emulate. Yet, even in this network culture, corporations like CNN draw on the very perspectives they also denigrate, pointing to the annihilation of perspectival distance and to the increased potential for alterity within entities that still attempt to situate themselves as the dominant “self” against which the degraded “other” is measured. While this notion of dominance depends on industrial-era hierarchies of production and consumption, participation in the production of content increasingly reflects the openness of network culture (Bruns 2008). As my analysis will show, the 2006 launch of the iReport website facilitated the merging of a previously closed production system with the open system of the networked community of citizen journalists, in turn engendering an explosion of ambivalent discourse from industry gurus. When iReport first launched, CNN’s own executives attempted to distinguish between professional correspondents and iReporters by invoking the qualities of emotional authenticity and embodied experience in their description of the iReport- ers’ labor. Indeed, industry commentators celebrated such qualities, even as they also raised questions about iReporters’ credibility as objective witnesses to traumatic events. For example, executives told MediaWeek that they were enthusiastic about citizen journalism because it is “emotional and real” (Woerz, quoted in Shields 2008) while in the same article underscoring the “comfortable” nature of audience participation in news gathering. This reference to emotional authenticity and comfort dif- fused the adventurousness typically associated with the professional war journalist, who was imagined as traveling across rough terrain and sacrificing domestic comfort for access to the objective facts. PR Week featured interviews with CNN executives who celebrated the first-person, experiential nature of the citizen journalist’s reports, as opposed to the professional journalist’s third-person accounts, where the authorita- tive reporter or news anchor could maintain the proper objective distance from the

Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on April 8, 2015 372 Television & New Media 14(5) event in order to best determine its meaning (Martin, quoted in Washkuch 2008). Trade publications also repeatedly flagged the emotional authenticity of the iReport- ers’ work, an authenticity that was carefully distinguished from that work’s technological or conceptual validity; credibility and validity were two terms that were far more often employed to disassociate professional journalists from the iReporters whose work was portrayed as merely supplemental to that of professionals (Martin, quoted in Washkuch 2008, 10). These discursive strategies signaled an undercurrent of anxiety in professional circles, anxiety that citizen journalism could potentially hijack the professional journalist’s monopoly on meaning itself. Accordingly, CNN executives asserted that the citizen journalists’ enrichment of professional labor was largely due to their ability to capture footage of breaking news on their smartphones with a speed that could not always be matched by professional reporters (Martin, quoted in Washkuch 2008). In this sense, professional journalists simultaneously celebrated and denigrated the embodied experience of the iReporters, implying that while such proximity could facilitate first-person accounts of certain events, it could also result in the citizen journalists’ inability to objectively make sense of their own video. If anyone could be a citizen journalist, then objective reporting could also give way to a glut of information, a frenzy of competing meanings. This was anathema to the professionals who had been trained to conceptualize their own perspectives as the reference point against which all other perspectives were measured (Hall et al. [1978] 1999; Morse [1998] 2004). Such professional anxiety was temporarily resolved through the dubious assertion that iReporters were simply global audience members with whom CNN was trying to “create a relationship” (Grant, quoted in Shields 2008). Walton declared that the use of iReport was a “natural extension” for CNN (quoted in Shields 2008), while David Almacy of Waggener Edstrom called iReport “the perfect marriage” between “the concept of citizen journalism” and a “branded media outlet” (quoted in Longpre 2008, 10). This notion of the “perfect marriage” seemed to position iReporters as the proverbial wives, whose unpaid labor was both disavowed and fundamental to CNN’s ability to cover global conflict. CNN did not need to pay as many professional reporters to travel the world, so long as they had iReporters who could upload the images instead. The trick was to take advantage of this free labor without forfeiting the network’s professional credibility and without allowing the network’s newscasts to be inundated with a glut of information. Industry ambivalence gained particular momentum during the media coverage of the Iranian elections and protests of 2009. At this time, the declarations that iReport- ers tended to be fickle and capricious, failing to remain objective and propagating dangerously inaccurate facts, acquired a new sense of urgency (Epps, quoted in Mahmud 2008). Trade publications and mainstream media outlets like the New York Times began revisiting the notion that iReport was initially marketed as a “post- moderated site” and that participants’ reports were only to be verified if producers thought they could use them in CNN’s official newscasts (Grant, quoted in Shields 2008). Daily Variety complained that CNN had become increasingly reliant on

Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on April 8, 2015 Palmer 373 footage from iReporters during the protests, and then followed this statement with a detailed description of the “vetting” process that involved a “team of Farsi speakers” combing through each image to determine “when, where, and of whom each shot was taken” (Thielman 2009, 3). Meanwhile, the New York Times accused CNN of “publish[ing] first, ask[ing] questions later” (Stelter 2009, 1), while CBS correspondent Elizabeth Palmer bemoaned iReporters’ lack of access to facts, subsequently conflating Iranian citizen journalists with her perception of the nation itself as a “country that runs on rumor” (quoted in Thielman 2009, 3). This nasty backlash from professional journalists highlighted the aforementioned guardianship of their credibility, a credibility further problematized by their constant censorship during the Iranian protests (Thielman 2009). ABC correspondent Jim Sciutto and his crew even began to use mobile phones and FlipVideo cams instead of their own more obtrusive equipment, going “under cover” as concerned citizens in order to get footage of the events (quoted in Thielman 2009: 3). Oddly enough, Sciutto’s use of the mobile media so often associated with amateurs did not appear to hurt his professional credibility, nor did it call the validity of his video into question. While this technology shed doubt on the iReporter’s credibility, it only seemed to solidify the resourcefulness of the professional. This was partly because the professional could “correctly” channel the mobile media’s potential to propagate multiple meanings back into the linear informational flow that depends on the traditional journalistic hierarchy between sender and receiver (Morse [1998] 2004). Still, in many cases, professional journalists were imprisoned or sent back home during this uprising, while the citizen journalists who supposedly lacked credibility were able to capture the footage that CNN needed. The anxiety over the perceived failures of professional journalism during this time is most evident in the discourse surrounding the digitally recorded death of twenty-six- year-old Neda Agha-Soltan, an Iranian woman who was fatally shot while observing the protests on June 20, 2009. The image of Soltan’s death was captured on cell phone video and quickly circulated around the world, uploaded onto sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and iReport. This image sparked what Nicolas Mirzoeff calls an “archival anxiety” (2009), where professional news organizations like CNN had to balance their attempts at verification with their desire to use the footage before anyone else did (Mortensen 2011). In this sense, the effort to determine the video’s validity underscored CNN’s larger effort at curtailing the multiple and competing ways in which the Iranian opposition might define itself—especially since, as Mohammad el-Nawawy has observed, CNN was more concerned with the Iranian government’s anti-West stance than with the complexities of the protesters’ political positions (2010). Consequently, professional journalists revealed a distinct ambivalence toward the video, juxtaposing assertions that Soltan had become the face of the Iranian opposition with speculations about the usefulness of such a martyr. This again signaled the U.S. news media’s struggle to reestablish dominance over the citizen journalists who, from diverse national locations, had facilitated the ubiquity of Soltan’s image and supplemented that image with competing interpretations of what her death meant to

Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on April 8, 2015 374 Television & New Media 14(5) the opposition. One CNN reporter interviewed Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian journalist for Newsweek who was imprisoned in Iran the day after Soltan’s death and then later released. When asked his opinion, on-camera, of Soltan’s martyrdom, Bahari told CNN: “Neda is a face that everyone can manipulate. Everyone can say, Neda belongs to us. And that is the problem with the Iranian opposition. They need a stronger symbol” (Riddell 2009). Bahari’s interview does not merely attempt to distract from Soltan’s cultural reso- nance, depoliticizing her martyrdom and subtly replacing the persecution of Iranian protesters and citizen journalists with his own story of persecution at the hands of Iranian authorities. Compellingly, this statement also references the informational space in which the image was propagated, a space defined by an “excess of sensory data, a radical indeterminacy in our knowledge, and a nonlinear temporality” (Terranova 2004, 37). If “everyone” can render Soltan’s image meaningful, Bahari claims, then Soltan’s image and its proliferation online is indicative of the glut of information that disrupts the hegemony of professional journalism. Such a statement indeed references the fact that hundreds of thousands of people had access to Soltan’s image almost instantaneously, and that this image was made to signify in a variety of ways across diverse contexts. This multiplicity of meaning, and the speed with which it was propagated, points again to the implosion of the perspectival space on which professional journalism depends. It also illuminates the aforementioned ways in which cultural processes begin to resemble the communicative processes that unfold within the complex informational milieu integral to network culture. Through his complaint that “everyone” can “manipulate” Soltan’s image, Bahari anxiously alludes to the complexly informational quality of her image and its distribution, attempting to counteract this phenomenon by touting the traditional representational system that has long secured the hegemony of professional journalism. Yet, this particular interview belies CNN’s heavy reliance on the amateur footage of Soltan’s death during this time, revealing the ambivalence fundamental to the interconnectedness of network culture. After Soltan’s death was captured on camera, CNN producers especially disavowed the labor of the iReporters who uploaded Soltan’s image onto iReport before CNN used the video on its official network. Some iReporters posted complaints, claiming that CNN had censored their accounts of Soltan’s death. Even so, one of CNN’s iReport producers told me via correspondence that CNN did not censor any of the video. Rather than censoring iReporters’ work, producer Henry Hanks says that CNN simply mediated that work, removing video until it could be traced to a specific owner and verified for validity using a professional set of standards (H. Hanks, online correspondence, November 11, 2010). If iReporters had immediately provided this information to CNN, then the process of distributing the video of Soltan’s death— according to Hanks—would have gone more smoothly. Hanks’s statement reveals CNN’s vacillation between the erasure of the citizen labor on which it depends and its invocation of the iReporters’ personal responsibilities to verify the validity of their footage. Andrejevic discusses a similar notion of responsibility, which he terms the “duty of interaction” (2007, 144). In this instance, the user is

Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on April 8, 2015 Palmer 375 taught to take responsibility for his or her consuming practices and pleasures, even as those practices produce capital for the corporations that encourage them. Andrejevic argues that this dutiful interactivity should be understood as a corporate strategy, where the labor of production gets offloaded onto the consumer. CNN disciplines its iReport- ers in just this decentralized way, at times addressing them as though they were obses- sive and ultimately volatile “fans” of the news organization, while at other times addressing them as students of professional journalism. Both modes of address situate iReporters as amateurs who do not deserve monetary compensation for their labor. Yet, iReporters overwhelmingly assert that their unpaid labor is willingly given. I will now turn to an analysis of the complex labor relations involved in iReporting, relying on Bruns’ explication of the prod-user’s labor, as well as on Terranova’s claims that such labor—fundamental to network culture—is often “pleasurably embraced” while at the same time “often shamelessly exploited” (Terranova 2004, 78). Drawing on a series of interviews completed with iReporters in 2010, I will complicate the neoliberal notion of monetary compensation, instead suggesting that many iReporters were seeking a very different type of reward during the protests of 2009.

Mapping the Labor A look at iReport’s fine print will reveal what Farooq Kperogi has referred to as the “many hidden assumptions” of the iReport site (2010, 321). In the iReport service agreement—a set of rules that all iReporters must agree to observe before their accounts go active—these terms are listed in relation to the status of participants’ contributions to the iReport site as well as to CNN more generally:

By submitting your material, for good and valuable consideration, the suffi- ciency and receipt of which you hereby acknowledge, you hereby grant to CNN and its affiliates a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to edit, telecast, rerun, reproduce, use, create derivative works from, syndicate, license, print, sublicense, distribute and otherwise exhibit the materials you submit, or any portion thereof in any manner and in any medium or forum, whether now known or hereafter devised, without payment to you or any third party. (2009, emphasis added)

While the service agreement stipulates that participants’ contributions must be made for free, the document goes on to attest that iReporters cannot copy or redistrib- ute any of CNN’s own copyrighted material without the written permission of CNN executives. This rule points to a different sort of hierarchy than the discursive distinc- tion between the credibility of the professional and the spuriousness of the amateur; in this case, the iReporters’ labor itself is monetarily devalued, while the production of CNN employees is protected by copyright law. The bald assertion of CNN’s exploitation of the iReporters’ production differs drastically from the language in the assignment section of the iReport site, where participants are encouraged to “share”

Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on April 8, 2015 376 Television & New Media 14(5) their stories and hone their skills according to the guidelines listed under the sympa- thetic “Need Help?” link. Such rhetoric is repeatedly bolstered by promises that iRe- porters’ work may soon run on the network or on CNN’s official website. In this sense, the assignment section promises a small amount of professional recognition for those iReporters who put in the right amount of hours while the service agreement stresses that there will be no financial compensation for the iReporters’ labor. To get a better sense of the iReporters’ own feelings on the merits of gaining professional recognition instead of financial compensation, I contacted more than 140 iReporters through the website’s inbox messaging system, asking them to recount their experiences reporting for the site. I contacted twenty-nine Global Challenge participants, leaving out the less active users who had contributed less than two iRe- ports, as well as 113 iReporters who had contributed two or more iReports covering the Iranian protests between June and August of 2009. When asked how CNN responded to their “thoughts, reports, and photography,” those who had participated in the Global Challenge optimistically referenced the possibility of professional recognition. One Global Challenge participant stated that after seeing her photos air on CNN’s official newscast, her interest in iReport grew, leading her to take even more photos for the website. Other iReporters for the Global Challenge assignment empha- sized how encouraging the iReport producers were, making them feel that their work was much appreciated. This reference to professional recognition and appreciation was a recurring theme. Some of the Global Challenge participants specified that iReport producers had found their personal blogs online and were impressed enough to seek them out; these iReporters identified themselves as semi-professional writers or aspiring journalists. The possibility of using iReport as a platform to gain monetary compensation down the line seemed to be a primary factor in motivating these writers, a possibility that is not altogether unrealistic according to Hanks. He informed me that the CNN iReport intern- ship is typically filled by a former iReporter and that CNN has also hired former iRe- porters as employees. Still, Hanks continued the tradition of distinguishing between amateurs and professionals by stressing the word “former”—paid CNN employees can only be “former” iReporters, while current iReporters work for free. This statement not only echoes the aforementioned industry discourse on citizen journalism; at first glance, Hanks’s assertion also resonates for Andrejevic’s argu- ment that uncompensated online activity has been increasingly appropriated by corporations, with much corporate labor being offloaded onto consumers (2007). Indeed, Farooq Kperogi has declared iReport as merely one more example of “corporate media hegemons . . . co-opting what was once the subversive sphere of citizen journalism” (2010, 316). Still, while the iReporters’ labor is undeniably uncompensated, Bruns’ notion of prod-usage complicates the notion of consumer exploitation. If iRe- port can be viewed not merely as a corporate construction, but also as a very real site of networked collaboration, then the activity unfolding there must be aligned with prod-users rather than consumers—with the “users” who “are always already neces- sarily also producers of the shared knowledge base” (2008, 2). While CNN is indeed

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“harvesting” such prod-usage, as Bruns might put it, the knowledge base on which CNN draws is irrevocably changed. Correspondingly, Terranova asserts that the notion of a monolithic corporate struc- ture appropriating the “authentic” labor of the online user should be scrutinized, because “incorporation is not about capital descending on authentic culture” but about “collective cultural labor” being “voluntarily channeled and controversially structured within capitalist business practices” (2004, 80, emphasis Terranova’s). In this sense, not all uncompensated labor is wholly exploited labor, since the conditions that “make free labor an important element of the digital economy are based on a difficult, experi- mental compromise” between the “desire for creative production . . . and the current capitalist emphasis on knowledge as the main source of added value” (2004, 77). This kind of work does not happen simply “because capital wants [it] to,” but because of a “desire for affective and cultural production which [is] none the less real because [it] is socially shaped” (Terranova 2004, 77). Through the lenses provided by Bruns and Terranova, one could argue that the Global Challenge participants’ labor is driven by the desire to produce, and that they view the pleasure of production, as well as the resulting recognition, as compensation enough. Many of the interviewees referenced the pleasure they felt at seeing their own pictures and videos air on CNN’s official newscasts. This reward for their production in turn fueled their desire to continue producing, allowing them to create a portfolio that could further professionalize them as aspiring writers and reporters. The participants’ drive to produce, and their emphasis on the professionalization that could occur even without monetary compensation, suggests that such unpaid labor is not simply being appropriated, but negotiated—structured within a complex set of business practices that harness and channel the very real desire to produce. The desire to produce also informed the citizen coverage of the Iranian uprisings, though for very different reasons. In that context, iReporters were attempting to produce a variety of political messages that could then be quickly communicated across wide distances. My correspondence with iReporters involved in the protests of 2009 revealed that participants’ hope of telling the world about the events in Iran was the driving force behind the hours spent working without pay. The recognition so often mentioned on the iReport site, as well as by the Global Challenge participants, was in this case recoded as visibility—not the visibility of the iReporters themselves but the visibility of the political information being distributed. The possibility of flooding the global news media with protesters’ own opinions of the events—opinions that often competed with those of professional journalists based in the United States—inspired the dedication of the iReporters’ unpaid labor. Thus, rather than utilizing iReport as a sort of training camp for a future career in journalism, these iReporters appropriated the CNN technology only so that they could distribute their political messages in a way that ultimately disrupted the traditional representational system on which professional journalism depends. One iReporter stated that he chose to work with the website during this time because “it was connected to a prominent and well respected establishment, it had

Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on April 8, 2015 378 Television & New Media 14(5) many viewers, and it was visible to people from all around the world, including Iran.” He argued that such visibility helped protesters within Iranian borders to realize that “despite all the hardship they were not alone. This seemed to give them additional strength.” Thus, CNN’s corporate communications technology was made to work for the iReporters in this case, sending messages of support to those who were being misrepresented by Western media (Mirsepassi 2010). Most of the iReporters with whom I spoke mentioned this ability to encourage and support the protests through the use of sites like iReport. They also noted that iReport was useful to them because it served as one of many channels along which they could relay multiple interpretations of the events in Iran. Numerous participants said they used several other social media technologies during the protests, drawing on sites like Twitter and Facebook as well as iReport. This practice suggests that during the uprisings, iReport operated as one node in a larger network of communication, pointing again to Bruns’s notion of the openness of systems in the age of the prod-user. Even more compellingly, when iReporters covering the protests felt they had maximized CNN’s potential for their purposes, many all but abandoned their iReport accounts, ceasing their labor for the website and only peri- odically checking in to see what other iReporters were saying. In this sense, these iReporters ensured that CNN’s effort at harvesting their labor could only be success- ful as long as they were getting something in return. Rather than losing their political identities in their affiliation with the CNN brand, these iReporters manipulated that brand to make it work for them. This proves that though their unpaid labor was structured within CNN’s complex business practices, these iReporters were still not entirely controlled by CNN’s business system, pointing again to Terranova’s assertion that this kind of labor is not merely exploited by capitalism but is also evidence of the desire to creatively produce (Terranova 2004). Still, not all of the iReporters covering the Iranian protests were optimistic about the site’s potential. One iReporter told me that CNN’s promise of visibility did not entirely pay off, since the network carefully filtered the content that iReporters uploaded. This mediation limited the iReporters’ coverage of the events in Iran even as U.S. news media ambivalently chided the Nokia Siemens telecommunications company for its role in another type of control. The Wall Street Journal reported that many people using cell phones to send informational texts and images to second- party distributors outside Iran were being tracked by the Iranian government via technology purchased from Nokia Siemens (Rhoads and Chao 2009). This accusation led to a proliferation of discourse on the dual nature of interconnectedness, a circum- stance that generates the potential for collective action as well as the potential for persecution. I will now examine this duality in greater detail, illuminating CNN’s “soft control” of the iReporters who attempted to expose Nokia Siemens’s insidious involvement in the persecution of Iranian protesters. Such soft control points to the nefarious ways in which the aforementioned desire to produce is often channeled along those pathways that are most beneficial to corporate executives. Yet, I will also reveal the ways in which iReporters used their CNN-sanctioned website as a space in

Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on April 8, 2015 Palmer 379 which to expose Nokia Siemens and to shame CNN, a fact that highlights the complexity of the perpetual negotiations inherent to network culture.

Mapping the Mediation Terranova explains that the “immaterial labor” of the kind being produced by iReport- ers is “a virtuality which belongs to postindustrial productive subjectivity as a whole,” and she argues that soft control is focused on containing and channeling such virtuality along the most “desirable plateaus” (2004, 83, 119, 122). Moreover, Terranova attests that existing politics produce “a sensibility to social change (and forms of subjectivity) that are informed by the relationship between the real and the possible— where the real is what remains while all other competing possibilities are excluded” (2004, 25). Taking issue with this existing political stance, Terranova warns against the conceptualization of a “real understood as devoid of transformative potential to the forces that exceed it from all sides” and explains that the virtual is this very excess of possibility (2004, 27). Though Terranova says the virtual—while it is still virtual— can only “irrupt and then recede” leaving mere traces, it still possesses the power to “stab at the fabric of possibility,” undoing “the coincidence of the real with the given” (2004, 24, emphasis added). In reaction to this powerful potential, Terranova states that soft control operates in a minimal, deregulated way in order to steer the virtual along “the most desirable” channels (2004, 119, 122). Through this lens, it could be argued that CNN subjects the transformative potential generated by its iReporters to soft control. From establishing a service agreement that holds the users responsible for uploading only the information that they themselves own, to instating a “vetting” process that purports to merely verify rather than censor participants’ information, CNN channels the potential embedded within iReport along the pathways most desirable for the corporation itself. Crucially, CNN attempts to channel this potential without intervening so decisively that the iReporters’ innovative labor might stop altogether. In turn, the service agreement subjects iReporters to soft control not only by facilitating the exploitation of users’ labor but also by demanding that users be capable of accounting for the ownership of the video and information they upload:

You shall not upload, post or otherwise make available on CNN iReport any material protected by copyright, trademark, or other proprietary right without the express written permission of the owner of the copyright, trademark or other proprietary right and the burden of determining that any material is not protected by copyright or other proprietary rights rests with you. . . . Without limit- ing the foregoing, CNN iReport shall have the right to remove any material that CNN, in its sole discretion, finds to be in violation of the provisions hereof or otherwise objectionable. (CNN 2009, Terms of Service).

In other words, this service agreement demands that iReporters monitor themselves in order to avoid being monitored by the corporation, specifically stipulating that all

Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on April 8, 2015 380 Television & New Media 14(5) uploaded information be accompanied with written permission from its owner. In this way, iReporters must follow professional standards that often limit the potential of their messages, standards that force them to streamline their coverage of world events in a manner that thwarts the virtual and instead reproduces CNN’s notion of the “real”—the “valid” report gleaned from a “credible” source who can provide written permission to use the video in question. Yet such written permission was almost impossible to obtain during the Iranian protests of 2009. Many of the iReporters I interviewed informed me that the images being circulated around the world from various computers and cell phones in and outside of Iran were difficult to trace back to specific owners, largely because these people did not at all wish to be traced. The individualistic Western rhetoric of ownership held no value to the people who simply wanted the information copied and distributed on multiple platforms; such recognition could place these individuals in grave danger. Several of the iReporters who responded to my message told me that they were not based in Iran, and they informed me that much of the coverage of the events had to be completed by second-party sympathizers because of the possible dangers to Iranian citizens trying to upload information to iReport within Iranian borders. One iReporter, whose where- abouts were unclear, told me that he could not even engage in correspondence with me, as he had discontinued all political activity for the safety of his family. Thus, the Western understanding of ownership was quite beside the point. All the same, the iReport producers removed protest footage that they could not attribute to a particular person, according to one iReporter with whom I spoke. This participant told me that when he uploaded his own video of solidarity protests in New York, the iReport producers immediately placed the “Vetted by CNN” badge over his video and even used some of that video on the official CNN newscasts. Conversely, when this same iReporter uploaded video sent to him from friends, family, and strangers in Iran, CNN removed that video from the site on the grounds that the iReporter could not get written verification of ownership. CNN also refused to use any information on its newscasts or on its official website without first verifying the validity of that information—and of the video itself—according to traditional journalistic standards. Indeed, the verification process involved a staff of around nine paid professionals, and took quite a bit of time, depending on how quickly the sub- mitter responded to correspondence from iReport producers—and how much “additional reporting [was] required” (H. Hanks, online correspondence, November 11, 2010). iReporters participating in the protests did not have this kind of time. Through these methods, iReport revealed itself to be a space in which all the productive potential of citizen journalism is generated, even as that potential is channeled down the “most desirable plateaus” (Terranova 2004, 122). During the protests, iReporters indeed challenged the “coincidence of the real with the given,” inundating the CNN-sanctioned website with competing perspectives on the opposition, as well as with diverse suggestions for political reform. Yet, CNN drew on this political dedication, in all its potent unpredictability, and ultimately attempted to mediate this pas- sion in a way that would keep the iReporters’ images flowing into the network while

Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on April 8, 2015 Palmer 381 still containing their powerful volatility. Such soft control appears to be a conse- quence of interconnectedness, even as that interconnectedness continues to generate unpredictable possibilities. One of the unpredictable possibilities generated—and mediated—by CNN was the iReporters’ special attention to the Nokia Siemens scandal. This scandal itself pointed to the potency of soft control, as well as to the paradoxical qualities of interconnectedness, with Nokia Siemens officials addressing such duality in the Corporate Responsibility Report that they released only months after coverage of the Iranian opposition had died down. The report asserted:

As with any tool, administrations may abuse the access they have to communications networks in ways that could compromise the human right to privacy and confidentiality of communications. We condemn such abuse and endeavor to minimize the potential, but the risk remains. (2009, 44)

A look at this report reveals the ways in which Nokia Siemens, like CNN, places responsibility onto the users of its equipment, rather than on any central locus of control. This passage is especially chilling when juxtaposed with another passage of the report that celebrates the forty million Iranians who, up to that point, had “bought their first mobile phone,” all thanks to Nokia Siemens (2009, 44). After the scandal, Nokia Siemens executives reiterated their stance that customers—be they individual cell-phone users, or entire governments—should take personal responsibility for the use and the misuse of such technology. Invoking the notion of inevitable risk, only to be combated through personal responsibility, Nokia Siemens ambivalently flagged the catastrophic potential of the virtual, simultaneously celebrating and bemoaning the unpredictable ways in which the people who wield technology might “stab at the fabric of possibility” (Terranova 2004, 24). This unpredictability inspired the telecommunications company’s effort at invoking personal responsibility. Such logic is representative of “New Economy capitalism”—where corporations benefit from the “potentially infinite productivity” structured within this socioeco- nomic system, while simultaneously “controlling its catastrophic potential” (Terranova 2004, 106). Soft control operates according to a decentralized logic that will not squelch the entire system’s ability to productively exceed expectations, yet this ability to exceed expectations can also result in the transformation of existing social systems. Because of this, soft control draws on the neoliberal rhetoric of creativity and innovation— which is often recoded as individual risk and personal responsibility—while at the same time attempting to channel such innovation along the pathways least likely to upset the status quo. The use of telecommunications technology during the Iranian uprisings serves as a prime example of the status quo being disrupted, across a variety of national and cultural contexts. In turn, CNN’s effort at controlling its iReporters’ coverage of the Nokia Siemens scandal exemplifies the insidious ways in which the “abstract machine of soft control” often results in the containment of the transformative potential permeating the New Economy.

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Significantly, many of the iReporters who covered the protests of 2009 used the iReport website as a space in which to contest Nokia Siemens’s neoliberal rhetoric, pointing to the complexity of the informational milieu fundamental to network culture. Some of the iReporters simply reposted articles on the scandal from sources like The Wall Street Journal, while others voiced their own opinions. These posts bluntly underscored the hypocrisy of Nokia Siemens, as well as noting the fact that mainstream U.S. media coverage of the scandal left much to be desired. Other iRe- porters used the website as a space in which to post subversive artwork that illumi- nated the dual nature of interconnectedness. One piece featured the words: “Nokia: Connecting People,” supplemented with the image of two hands reaching out to each other. Beneath these joined hands, the artist superimposed the image of Iranian government officials brutally beating a protester. Another piece displayed the same Nokia motto, with the word “connecting” crossed out. Beneath the partially obscured word “connecting,” the artist wrote the word “jailing” in bright red ink, exposing the darker side of Nokia’s celebratory rhetoric and overtly aligning Nokia with the persecution that many Iranian iReporters had to face alongside CNN’s soft control of their news coverage. None of the aforementioned posts on the Nokia Siemens scandal were vetted by CNN for use in professional newscasts, pointing again to CNN’s manipulation of the rhetoric of interconnectedness. While iReporters were told that they could use the website to create a collaborative community of the type that Bruns theorizes, CNN largely ignored iReporters’ collaborative discussion of the Nokia Siemens scandal. CNN’s own coverage of the scandal at some points drew on the same rhetoric of personal responsibility that Nokia itself used, pointing to the corporations’ shared philosophies on interconnectedness—philosophies recently revealed to be even more compatible. In May of 2011, Nokia announced its decision to partner with CNN, “delivering its rich mapping services to the international news network” (“CNN and Nokia Announce Plans” 2011). Nokia heralded the partnership as “a great fit,” since “both companies share a similar philosophy on connecting people beyond borders” (“CNN and Nokia Announce Plans” 2011). Indeed, both Nokia and CNN seem to view the process of mapping the world as a collaboration between corporations and personally responsible citizens, who can only benefit from interconnectedness if they use these tools in the manner most beneficial to the corporations themselves. Still, the very fact that iReporters used a CNN-sponsored website as a space in which to engage in a meta-discussion of the Nokia Siemens scandal points to the complexity of interconnectedness in network culture, proving that in this informational milieu, citizen journalism is less a story of utter exploitation and more a story of perpetual negotiation. The transformative potential generated on the iReport site may be channeled down those pathways most beneficial for CNN (and now, for Nokia Siemens), yet this does not change the fact that “new content has entered the control of production,” leading not merely to a “vague assemblage of information flows and feedback loops” but instead to a “spontaneously productive and autonomous force” that can only be partially controlled (Terranova 2004, 118). Though CNN attempted

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to curtail the productive ways in which iReporters challenged the authority of professional journalism during the Iranian uprisings, exploiting the unpaid labor that was willingly given in order to widely disseminate a variety of political messages, iReport- ers were also able to harness the potential of the CNN brand, flooding the mediascape with messages of encouragement and calls for reform.

Conclusion This case study highlights the numerous obstacles placed in front of the citizen journalists who increasingly draw on corporate visibility to tell their stories. In turn, it suggests that corporations like CNN are not “monolithic structures, but allow for internal complexity” (Goode 2009, 1289), especially as network culture fuels the increased interdependence of corporate news organizations and citizen journalism. The interdependence of CNN and citizen reporting complicates the static maps of the world that professional journalism attempts to construct. While interactive projects like iReport do not fully unleash the transformative potential embedded within them, they are still important sites at which to examine the disruptive capabilities of citizen journalists and the proliferation of possibilities they engender. Such disruption illuminates existing inequalities that need further investigation. At the very least, such disruption reveals that the project of staking out the political, social, and affective topographies that unfold within network culture— the project of “mapping” the world, in all its unevenness and multiplicity—should be a collaborative effort, and not just in name.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Author Biography Lindsay Palmer is a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, special- izing in television news, amateur video, and feminist theory. Her work has appeared in Genders and Feminist Review. She would like to thank her anonymous peer reviewers for their suggestions as well as Lisa Parks for her invaluable advice on this essay in its various stages.

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