8:41am Friday 19th June 2009
By David Barnett
I’m not a huge fan of citizen journalism, which I know rather goes against the grain of current thinking.
For starters, it might well do me out of a job in the not-too-distant future, which is reason enough, albeit a very personal one. The other is that the bulk of the so-called citizen journalism out there just isn’t very good.
By “citizen journalism” we generally mean “stuff on the internet”. And around 95 per cent of it (a made-up statistic) is purely subjective commentary.
While comment does have its place in journalism, it isn’t the meat and potatoes of journalism. A one-time editor of The Guardian, C P Snow, once said that comment is free, but facts are sacred. Anyone can have an opinion. Most people have several. Now, with the advent of cheap computer equipment, broadband internet for every man and his dog and the proliferation of blogging and social networking sites offering free platforms, everyone can publish their opinion for the world to see.
There’s very little fact out there in what’s being published on the web, verifiable fact that is. Say what you like about the established news-gathering operations such as newspapers, radio and TV, at least they are, for the most part ,“trusted sources”, with trained, professional journalists operating within the parameters of taste, decency and the law.
There are exceptions, of course. We at newspapers can’t be everywhere at once, so we are infinitely grateful for those readers who contact us with their own eye-witness reports of incidents, or who take photos and e-mail or text them to us. That is true citizen journalism.
Another example is one I’ve been following this week on Twitter – the social networking site on which users update their current status in no more than 140 characters – including spaces, commas and full stops.
Twitter sounds like a frippery, a waste of time. I thought as much, too, until someone calling themselves persiankiwi began to post a series of messages.
Whoever persiankiwi is – and I suppose there’s a slim chance it’s a 14-year-old boy in his bedroom in Slough, but having read the posts I don’t think so – he or she is based in Tehran, and has been Tweeting up-to-the-second reports of what unfolded after the contentious Iran elections.
Persiankiwi’s messages make for sobering reading. They are compulsive and, at the same time, horrifying. Under great pressure, in fear for their very lives, persiankiwi and his or her fellow Tweeters talked of beatings, secret police going door to door, internet networks being shut down by the authorities, even shootings. And it was all happening in real time, well before the BBC or the other rolling news sources were able to get information from within Iran.
By the time you read this, persiankiwi might have been taken off line, arrested, or even worse. But what he or she has done so far is a brave, unflinching effort to get the truth out to the world. And the Tweets are sent without comment – just, as C P Snow was so fond of, the sacred facts.
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