Citizen Journalism in My Home Town

“Citizen Journalism” has been in the news lately. In fact, “Journalism” by itself has as well. Both are coming under fire lately. Many of the places that I found doing searches on “Citizen Journalism” state that what differentiates the two, is that private individuals do essentially what professional reporters do. So then what is a professional reporter? Well, firstly, they get paid. How much is determined by their contribution I guess. So what is contribution? That’d have to be marketable contribution. Most media, both offline and online newspapers, mainstream and cable networks, magazines, and weekly or daily newspapers then have “professional” reporters. But how much that contributes to the outlets or readers is debatable.

The outcry of elitism comes from citizen journalists and their readers because there is such a wide distrust of media now. I dare say most of todays news is tainted by bias in some fashion and they aren’t even aware of it. What splashes the front pages is not news anymore, it’s opinion. There certainly are many ways to shape the narratives and persuade people into agreeing with the written word. Interjection of logical fallacies it probably most prevalent. Collusion across media to fit a narrative is another. Elitism is prevalent in the professional industry. They believe that simply because citizen journalists don’t have a 4 year degree or don’t work for a media company, they dismiss them without any analysis of their work.

So there are some professional journalists that are good at what they do. Sadly, they are a dying breed. Most news is simply an aggregation of a few sources spun into slanted opinion, peppered with logical fallacies, lies and innuendo, and specifically promoting group think.

So I have had a lot of experience over the years blogging, writing a book, and to some extent, researching and investigative work. I’d like to revive some of those and introduce the concept of citizen journalism in my home town. I do have a few problems though. Lot’s of the citizen journalism found is nationally based and because of that, are simply rehashing of the same stories, things that I criticized the main stream media for. Nationally, there is a never ending stream of information, good or bad, that can be the basis of any story. Here in my town, we only have a newspaper that publishes once a week. We have no TV other than a large metropolitan area to the west, and no radio stations. Let’s simply say, we have really one one source of informational news, that is the weekly newspaper. Even then, it’s readership amounts to less than 5% of the population. That newspaper is also in the back pocket of the local school board, government, and business establishment.

So any investigative work really has to be almost 100% done by me. Let me tell you from experience, it’s not that easy. I can’t go plop myself down in front of a county administrator, mayor, or sheriff, and start asking questions. It has to be done a lot more slyly using FOIA requests, calls, raising potential issues publically, analysis, and then somehow disseminated to the public. That takes time, I don’t have. My goal will be to start doing it via a news blog and here, and recruit others to join me. I’ve done it before over 10 years ago and had a blog with over 5000 posts, that has since been shut down.

So what I’d like from you is to relay any comments on strategies that may help, be them big or small. I don’t want to take over the newspaper, I just want there to be an alternative that people can look to.