Citizen Journalism in trouble as Backfence reorganizes
By Tom Foremski - January 10, 2007
Dan Gillmor, the dean of citizen journalism, sold (or gave) his BayoSphere citizen journalism project to Backfence, a once-promising citizen journalism startup. Backfence, however, has run into problems as Amy Gahran, over at Poynter.org describes:
Backfence (which runs a high-profile family of hyperlocal citizen-media sites) announced a substantial retrenchment. CEO and co-founder Susan DeFife resigned, citing differences with the company's board of directors. Also, 12 of 18 employees were laid off.
Poynter.org: Backfence Backpedals: Money Lessons
Ms Gahran runs through many possible reasons why the venture has failed to succeed. Please see: Backfence Backpedals: Money Lessons
Tom's take: Citizen journalism is hard to do without a considerable involvement of professional editors. It is similar to trying to run a high school newspaper and requires a lot of work. Dan Gillmor discovered this with Bayosphere, which had a very small community involvement.
It is not enough just to put up a site and have a grateful army of citizen journalists populate it with great content. Journalism is not that simple.
Dan Gillmor's favorite refrain is that his readers know far more about the subject he writes about than he does. That might be true, but that doesn't mean they know how best to tell a story.
Often, they are not able to tell a story because they are too close to it--they might get into trouble. And journalists get to talk to a lot of people, they can add connections and relevancy, and improve upon news stories.
That's why we have professional journalists (and professional PR communicators). The job at hand is to help individuals, communities, organisations, and companies tell their stories in a compelling way. And the most compelling stories are true - and not spun.
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Comments (5)
The buzzword this year will be MONEY, rather than web 2.0.
http://mediavidea.blogspot.com/2007/01/show-me-money-buzzword-for-2007.html
Posted: January 11, 2007 5:38 AM
Hi Tom...
you're right that it's not enough to just give people a site and say "have at it" when it comes to citizen journalism (any more than it is to say "we're going to make all our money from ads!")
But I don't think that editors are necessarily the blanket answer. Citiizen journalism, as it exists now, is a fascinating, developing little thing: we have blogs about places that have a more personal tone; we have community sites (like Westport Now and the New Haven Independent and iBrattleboro) that have some editorial staff; and there's a fine national site, ePluribus Media, that has active editors who review major stories and "promote" stories when they are well-written and well researched (see Ilona Meager's PTSD timeline, the basis for a book on the subject.)
People involved in these projects are often quite astute, many having either worked at newspapers or media, have friends/family who've been involved in news, have worked on corporate publications, or are just amazingly talented amateurs (and there's nothing that says an amateur *can't* be amazingly intuitive and talented when it comes to journalism...j-school or working in a little newsroom are hardly measures of true talent.)
Personally, knowing many of the folks who've develop fine cit j sites, I've always wondered about the wisdom and reason for something like Backfence.com (and stuff like YourHub--yikes!). I know that it worked rather well in Maryland--that *could* be because the newspapers in that area were not very involved in the community and good word-of-mouth about Backfence helped it. But there's no account for how or why various community sites, developed by particular companies or newspapers, grow and maintain participation. I think there's alot more to it than simply saying that good community news needs
editors. :-)
Posted: January 11, 2007 6:21 AM
For the most part, I agree with your assessment regarding the difficulties at Backfence & its reliance on Citizen Journalism. There is definitely a challenge to craft a compelling story that professional writers are usually going to do better.
As you point out, there is also the problem of self-censorship. As Executive Producer at the Midpeninsula Community Media Center, I launched a cable TV show where we'd send a video crew to shoot and edit stories authored by persons from local organizations, agencies, and neighborhood associations. The citizen reporters all took a workshop on story-crafting.
Nevertheless, when a participating organization was involved in a local controversy, the reporter from that organization often found it a subject they didn't want to touch.
The internet allows folks who might be close to the situation, but not actually employed (or a Board member) to publish an article that could be filled with great information.
New models are inevitably going to emerge.
Posted: March 20, 2007 3:15 PM
I'm always bemused when people opine about "the difficulties" at Backfence without bothering to do any fact-checking or talking to those of us at the company. As co-founder and acting CEO of Backfence, I can tell you that while the company has had business model issues, we have been very pleased with the quality of contributions we've gotten from the community, and adding editors or journalists to the mix has never even remotely been considered necessary. We'd always like to see more community participation (that's more about marketing than anything else)--but the participation we've gotten has been excellent.
Posted: March 23, 2007 1:14 PM
I think that there is a bright future for citizen journalism especially when it is combined with professional journalism, and what I call "smart machine media" using algorithms to assemble information. This will be the "holy trinity" for future media, imho.
Posted: March 24, 2007 12:50 PM