Advice column: Is citizen journalism a reaction to biased reporting and infotainment?

We’ve introduced a new advice column featuring questions and answers relating to journalism, new media, user-generated content, local news, and anything else we cover in our blog or get asked about. If you have a question for a future column, please contact us.

Question: Is journalism shifting back to the people (bloggers/Internet denizens)? It seems [to me] that people may be getting frustrated with how the news is being obviously spun or being sold as infotainment. Or is it just becoming more obvious?

– Trent Wilkie in Edmonton, Alberta

Answer: Thanks for the question Trent, and you certainly picked a topic that could easily be debated for hours.

We think it’s important to note balance, or how news is presented, varies widely from city to city, outlet to outlet, country to country. While there are certainly a number of people who feel their news is biased or lacking in substance, we want to be sure to distinguish there are a number of differences depending who you read for news or even what you consider to be news in the first place. Not all news media are going the route of pushing celebrity gossip or political spin so we wouldn’t apply that blanket statement to all media.

With that caveat intro, it’s also difficult to say definitely if journalism is returning to The People. It’s really not a new trend.

Citizen journalism

Citizen journalists and bloggers have long been reporting the news from their communities, even before CNN’s iReport or OhMyNews in South Korea began.

In the 1960s especially, people reported on government strong-arm tactics via underground newspapers and magazines, often unsupported by mainstream media. Furthermore, people wrote accounts on bulletin boards before they could get their own blogs. In this sense, citizen journalism is not new.

You’re correct in assuming the trend toward user-generated content in news is becoming more obvious (Disclosure: our sister site, Digital Journal, is a user-generated media network). Many news outlets are looking at ways to complement their coverage with reports from their audience. How many times have we seen our local broadcast ask us to submit photos and stories from this or that event/crisis? In the past, those user-generated reports were slapped with an “amateur footage” label, but we see that less often as media organizations attempt to fold their audience into their newsroom to varying degrees.

We’re now in the age of the “audience formerly known as the people,” as media critic Jay Rosen once put it.

We always advise media outlets to not just talk to their fans, but engage them in the media process. The result is a large pool of sources, more content and a highly engaged readership that has a reason to regularly return to their specific media outlet. Also, we’ve seen how bloggers and citizen journalists are winning credit for digging up stories that fall through the cracks, no matter where they post the news.

Bias, infotainment and spin

Regarding your point on “infotainment,” we definitely do hear a lot from people who are frustrated with the trend. We heard heard many people they are no longer following their favourite media outlet simply because of this cheapening of news.

That said, it also depends on what medium we’re talking about. On the Web, readers can pick and choose what they want to consume; in print they can thumb through a magazine or newspaper to skip over content that isn’t of interest (even though Justin Bieber might dominate the front page instead of an important story from the Middle East); but on television and radio the listener/viewer must follow along with the format chosen by line-up editors and producers. Infotainment plays a different role in different mediums, but live-broadcast mediums could arguably be a more frustrating user experience in this case because the news consumer has no choice but to sit through and watch or listen even if the content is not of interest.

In our experience talking with news consumers, we find more people are turning to the Web to get their daily digest of news because they can filter content (infotainment or otherwise) very quickly. In fact, these days more people get their news from the Web than traditional printed sources.

When it comes to “spin” in news, we also think this really depends who you watch and where you live. Anecdotally speaking, we hear about spin and bias in reporting most often from Americans who say politicization and polarization has trickled into news lineups.

The topic of bias in journalism is as old as the craft itself, but we think the trend of including more opinionated news as part of a daily news offering is emerging because people do actually want to consume news that falls in-line with their interests or political beliefs. The Web is helping people find those specialized news outlets, too.

If you look at American programs and personalities such as Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann or Bill Maher (to name just a few), their opinionated voices have been added to the daily news lineup to offer audiences something other than hard news reporting. These shows have been given more exposure through networks because people do in fact tune-in and watch. Just because they’re on the air, however, doesn’t mean news is becoming more biased or politicized. They’re just shows that are part of the line-up and viewers know what to expect when they tune in. If they want hard news journalism, news organizations have countless other programs that cover that.

Today, no matter what type of news is being delivered (hard news, opinion, infotainment, bias or one-sided political Op-Eds), the simple fact is that there are a lot of choices for consumers and they can go anywhere to consume news or information that matters to them. When news junkies get frustrated by the production by their once-favourite news outlet, they turn elsewhere. It’s that simple.

- Future of Media editorial team

[Photo credit: Quinn Dombrowski]