It would seem, to my eyes, that too many people acting like journalists is a good problem to have. The more eyes and ears on a subject, generally speaking, the more information likely to come out. Not all will be credible, or thoughtful, or useful, but the odds are better that facts will find their way to the surface as more people, professionals or otherwise, dig in.

David Hazinski, a broadcast journalism professor at the University of Georgia, disagrees with this in a column published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Supporters of “citizen journalism” argue it provides independent, accurate, reliable information that the traditional media don’t provide. While it has its place, the reality is it really isn’t journalism at all, and it opens up information flow to the strong probability of fraud and abuse. The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend.

Put aside that regulating who gets to report and publish flies the face of the First Amendment. Congress can’t, and the media certainly can’t. So arguing that either should sounds a bit pointless. But hold off on that for a moment. (Or, if you really want a blow-by-blow fisking, read Dan Gillmor’s take).

Let’s consider what Hazinski sounds like he’s really advocating:

Where there are no journalists

Before you start griping that blogs are going to take CNN down a peg (and I’m not griping about that at all), consider what it’s like when your CNN is CCTV, when your AP is Xinhua. Remember the Chongqing Nail House? Or the PX plant in Xiamen? Not a whole lot of coverage there in China Daily.

Now think about countries that don’t even have that much news. Heard much out of Africa lately?

When you actually want to find out in countries that aren’t overflowing with media, that don’t have 24-hour cable networks following Larry Craig into the bathroom and checking into where Hillary Clinton is getting her campaign money (as they should), places that only make headlines when they get wiped out by tsunamis, who else is out there?

Us and Them

Underlying Hazinski’s rhetoric are two stagnant myths that get trotted out far too often when old media starts taking swings at new media. First, that there is an easily defined thing called “a journalist,” that this thing is easily wrapped in plastic and shipped around the world where it will absorb information without prejudice and send it back to headquarters unscathed. The limits of who or what can be rightly called a journalist are defined by a paycheck and a press pass. This myth says that what’s above the byline counts more than what’s under it.

But journalism is about doing more than being. It’s about reporting, and writing, and editing and producing—everything we want to see in a good piece of news. It’s about finding and sharing information.

The second myth is that we all want to produce and consume the same thing. Criticism of citizen journalism so often seems to assume that bloggers and podcasters and YouTubers all want to replace the media model that has existed since Ben Franklin started having gender issues and writing letters-to-the-editor as Silence Dogood.

More more more

There is plenty of ink and TV coming out of Beijing and Shanghai. Foreign coverage abounds, for good and obvious reasons. Much of it is excellent.

But China is huge. There is no feasible way for any single news agency, or even the combined efforts of that agency and all the wires it subscribes to, to hit everything. There’s just too much.

And that’s OK. Not everything is interesting to everyone. I don’t really keep up on what’s happening with the latest US-China trade talks, but I’m glued to Times’ Choking on Growth series. And when I feel like going deeper, there’s Shanghaiist, or Responsible China, or AfricaBeat, or China Law Blog. I shouldn’t even have to say this at the end of 2007, but seriously, where else am I getting what Global Voices is producing? Or Danwei? Or ESWN?

Consider what Robert Scoble told Thomas Crampton the other day:

There’s lots of opportunity for content that hasn’t gotten past the committees that run big TV stations. But because of low cost of this stuff, I can create new content that goes into new areas, and I don’t need to clone CNN.

Yes, a lot of what gets printed on The Internets is crap. Much of it isn’t journalism and doesn’t pretend to be. As the Google guys would say, this is a search problem. And I sure as hell won’t object to more information, more dialog and more engagement, especially in places like China. Isn’t that what we, who have the audacity to call ourselves journalists, want from the public anyway? Time to study up, professor.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 7:17 pm and is filed under News, projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.