I’m a huge fan of citizen journalism. I think that incorporating what private citizens see and hear into the mainstream news is important for a variety of reasons.
Also for a variety of reasons, photos and videos are the biggest part of that, from the video of the Rodney King beating to images of the London bombings earlier this year.
But there’s a downside: The lack of editors. Not in the sense of “someone to review the copy and clean up the text,’ or even “someone to make sure we’ve hit all the right points.” I’m thinking specifically of photos.
There’s a value to limited space — to having only so many pages or minutes. It means you can’t simply treat reporting as a data dump. You can’t simply throw a lot of information up, unedited, and call it journalism.
Today I saw a perfect example.
There was many a photographer in Jordan after the attacks there yesterday, and plenty of great citizen photojournalism is likely to come out of it.
And, just as with the London bombings, many folks are uploading their photos to Flickr, which is the most popular photo-sharing site around. (Flickr allows you to create a photo “set,” for example, “Jordan bombings,” that anyone can contribute to. That saves visitors the trouble of trying to find dozens of separate collections.)
There’s one of these sets for the Amman peace demonstrations. And here we see the problem — it’s a photo data dump. A sample image:
Quite frankly, it’s a bad photo. It doesn’t show anything useful or even identifyable. It would never make it into a professional magazine or newspaper or Web site. But when you get into “data-dump journalism,” it fits right in.
That’s a problem. The purpose of editors — or, rather, editing — is to clean up the clutter. It’s to help us deal with information overload.
Of course, there’s a good argument that says, “Yes, but then you get bias. Editors are the ones who say, ‘Show the photo of the Florin Army officer holding the gun to the head of the guy from Guilder’ or whatever. They can promote or hide information to make a point. One editor’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.
That’s a downside to limited space; you can’t always show the nuance of both sides.
But there danger of pure, open citizen journalism: Clutter. That image above is clutter. There are plenty more like it in the photoset, and they take time away from the good shots. The set needs an editor.
To be great, to truly make a difference, good citizen photo- and video-journalism needs to be a partnership between the folks who are there with the cameras and the folks who can look through their images and videos to best tell a story.
A dedicated editor, like those in the mainstream media, would work. So would a visitor-voting system — it might bring the best images to the top and save all of us the time and effort of wading through the chaff to find the wheat.
But whatever system is in place is going to make a better end product for all of us: One that balances completeness with objectivity, and one that takes advantage of the unlimited space of the Web to tell the most compelling stories.
