CNN and Citizen Journalism in Network Culture

TVN14510.1177/152747641 4464872446487PalmerTelevision & New Media Article 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 dissemi- nate 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 optimis- tic proponents of citizen journalism identify as media witnessing (Frosh and Pinchevski 2009; Gillmor 2004). Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on April 8, 2015 Palmer 369 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 “pleasur- ably 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 commu- nication 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

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