"Citizen journalism" strikes again

[Peter Fisk]

Apple denies report of Steve Jobs heart attack
Friday October 3, 11:39 am ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An Internet report claiming that Apple Inc chief executive Steve Jobs has had a heart attack is not true, the company said on Friday.

Responding to a report in "iReport", a citizen journalist web site owned and operated by Time Warner Inc's CNN, Apple spokesman Steve Dowling told Reuters by email: "It is not true."

The report claimed Jobs was rushed to the emergency room after suffering "a major heart attack."

Asked for further details about the status of Jobs' health, Dowling repeated: "The story is not true."

The report has since been removed from iReport. A CNN spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Apple shares, which have in the past been shaken by the question of Jobs' health, climbed more than 5 percent in early trade but retreated as the rumor gained momentum on Internet blogs. The stock at one point was down more than 2 percent, and hit a 17-month low of $94.65.

After Apple denied the report, the shares recovered, climbing to $104.04, up 3.9 percent on Nasdaq.

The report comes about a month after Jobs, who is often perceived as irreplaceable as Apple's leader, introduced new iPod digital music players, appearing thin but jaunty. He walked on a stage in front of a screen that flashed "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" -- a quotation borrowed from Mark Twain.

Before that event, investors for months had been concerned about the cancer survivor's health after he appeared thin at another product launch in June. In 2004, Jobs, 53, said he had undergone successful surgery to remove a rare type of pancreatic cancer.

Volatile trading in Apple's shares on Friday may also have been influenced by Barclays Capital's report that it had slashed its price target on Apple to $135 a share from to $180 a share.

The iReport site carries a disclaimer stating: "CNN makes no guarantees about the content or the coverage on iReport.com."

Several major new organizations, including Reuters, offer readers an opportunity to submit first-person news reports and photographs via the web.

[dfisher]

Of course, we wouldn't want to forget the pros and the many and varied "strikes" they've made, too, despite all that editing.

Rather, Kelly, Glass, Blair, Bloomberg/Google, and a file drawer full of stories about lesser lights I have in my office.

I agree; in this day and age we need to tune our BS detectors ever higher. We need to find better ways to vet this material, which is being injected into decades-old workflows that are not really equipped to handle it.

But your headline, Peter, is disingenuous. Those same "citizen journalists" have given us many of the important things to come out on Palin and Gonzales and earmarks and CBS (oops, sorry, got carried away there). I like the odds ...

[Peter Fisk]

Thanks for your thoughts, Doug. But I stand by the notion that the decline of professional journalism is bad for society.

Of course professionals have made errors. However, citing those professional errors as evidence that it’s desirable to turn the field over to amateurs is an exercise in false logic. There are surgeons who’ve committed medical malpractice; therefore it’s OK to have Uncle Louie do your appendectomy because he’s handy with a pocket knife and he’ll do it for free.

Your invocation of the Bloomberg/Google debacle is curious. I actually see it as another example of what can go very wrong when the function of journalism is turned over to non-journalists.

In those instances where citizen journalism has shed light on important information, those stories still needed to be investigated and properly reported by credible professionals. Much of what I have seen credited as valuable citizen journalism is what we used to call, in the olden days, “news tips.”

[dfisher]

Well golly gee, there Pete, there ya go again.

First of all, no one is saying "turn it over." Reread my response; it says that we need to incorporate the best of it but do so with new workflows that take into account the problems.

But if you think that "professional" journalists somehow own the field of journalism, then sadly you are part of the problem, not the solution.

Your medical malpractice analogy is faulty. What we do has consequences, but not nearly as severe as medical malpractice. If we extend your logic, then what we do is so important we should be licensed just like other professions. Sorry, but you can't have it both ways -- a field where anybody can do it but then bitch about the standards.

Last time I checked, most of the "professional" journalism in this country actually started out as "citizen" journalism. We journalists tend to forget, or ignore, our history.

[editer]

But if you think that "professional" journalists somehow own the field of journalism, then sadly you are part of the problem, not the solution.

This.

Edited to add: Peter's posts remind me of the long-running memes on Testy Copy Editors that a) journalism schools are pretty much worthless and b) journalism should be left to the professionals.

Where the culture of professionalism, and the professionals themselves, would come from without J-schools is left as an exercise for the reader.

[Peter Fisk]

Well golly gee, there Pete, there ya go again. ...
But if you think that "professional" journalists somehow own the field of journalism, then sadly you are part of the problem, not the solution.

Well, Doug, if your "solution" is an unpaid-labor model, you're damn right I'm not part of that.

We need to be looking toward a real solution, not a pathetic capitulation to market failure.

Last time I checked, most of the "professional" journalism in this country actually started out as "citizen" journalism. We journalists tend to forget, or ignore, our history.

Yeah, and our houses didn't have running water 200 years ago either. Sounds like you agree that "citizen journalism" constitutes a huge leap backward.

[Peter Fisk]

Edited to add: Peter's posts remind me of the long-running memes on Testy Copy Editors that a) journalism schools are pretty much worthless and b) journalism should be left to the professionals.

Where the culture of professionalism, and the professionals themselves, would come from without J-schools is left as an exercise for the reader.

Editer, that strikes me as a false paradox. You seem to be suggesting that anyone who holds one extreme must necessarily reject the opposite extreme. But the extremes that you present are gross distortions of the viewpoints you’re lampooning, and those viewpoints are in truth quite compatible.

Between your fallacious poles lies the common sense of middle-ground reality:

Many journalists have majored in journalism in college, and there are several high-quality j-schools out there. However, many very good journalists did not major in journalism in college, and there are actually some terrific journalists who do not hold college degrees at all. It has been typical in this field for entry-level workers to go through a sort of apprenticeship system, whereby they "learn the ropes" and develop their skills. A j-school degree is certainly helpful in this, but not necessarily required. Alternative educational backgrounds and experiences can actually be more useful to a journalist than a four-year journalism degree. And unfortunately, some of what is taught in journalism classes is a waste of time, and some is actually foolish and counterproductive. While it's not necessary to have a j-school degree, journalists should meet certain standards of competence and responsibility. These standards have traditionally been enforced by an editorial screening process. "Citizen journalism" by its very nature tends to eschew that "filter" and abandon those standards. As a reader, I find "citizen journalism" to be almost always a complete waste of my time. The writing is usually dreadful and full of spelling errors, and the information worthlessly unreliable. For me as a consumer and citizen, useful news coverage -- with starkly few exceptions -- is only possible when performed by people who do it for a living and are held accountable for their work.

There, and I didn't even use the word "professional" once.

[Pete Zicari]

I think that at least one of the reasons the amateur-vs-pro journalist debate is so difficult is that applies in several different contexts. The pro- and am- arguments have different weights depending on where they're applied. Five possible contexts:

-- Who should have the privilege of calling prominent people and asking questions, especially at all hours of the day and night?
-- Who can attend press conferences?
-- Who's a journalist for shield-law purposes?
-- Who can expect to see his or her content published in print, as opposed to online?
-- Who should get paid for work as a journalist?

For simplicity's sake, I'd like to define "journalist" as anyone who regularly collects and reports facts for general publication in a timely way. The definition ignores whether he or she is paid, or trained, or is writing or recording video, or is preparing "news" or "feature" copy. But it excludes Mrs. Badgley-Smith, attending city council meetings for the League of Women Voters, because she doesn't write more than once a month, and just for her club; it excludes random pamphleteers, ditto; and it excludes Dr. Fawcett, writing a treatise on the social implications of clogged sewers, because it's not timely.

It might include bloggers -- and it might not. I'd argue that someone who crowds into a news conference claiming to be a journalist merely because he writes a blog isn't necessarily in the right. If he can report several thousand hits a day, maybe he is. If he can't, his work can't be considered to be generally published. Newspapers, monthly shoppers and other publications fight this one out regularly when governments shift their legal ads to something cheaper or more compliant, so there's a long record of arguments on the subject.

I would define "professional" journalist as someone whose primary day-to-day occupation is journalism. That suggests he or she would be paid, but I suppose there are retirees and folks with independent incomes who would qualify. "Professional journalist" implies some other characteristics, including:

-- A desire to produce as accurate and complete a report as possible;
-- A commitment to crafting the report as carefully as possible within the contraints of time and equipment;
-- A good general knowlege of the subject at hand;
-- A willingness to keep his or her own opinions out of the report as much as possible, for accuracy's sake, and
-- A commitment to being fair, which is not the same as being objective.

Anyone can desire to do a good job, and anyone, pro- or am-, can fall short of it. But an experienced pro is more likely to do a better job on more assignments. Training is a way of condensing experience and establishing standards -- so if I were granting an interview to one of two young citizens, regardless of whether they worked in journalism, I would prefer the one who had some journalism training, reasoning that he or she would be less likely to waste my time. I would be inclined to trust someone I thought was a professional to try to understand me and treat me fairly.

To return to the list of contexts at top, you might argue that "anyone who meets the other criteria" ought to be able to publish in my newspaper, get paid for it, and harass public officials. But frankly, the person who meets all the other criteria is most likely going to be an agent of a print- or online publication -- for few others can afford to spend so much time on journalism without getting paid. Few publications can afford to pay reporters without a source of funds, and so you end up getting your journalism from recognized institutions. The owner of a publication is going to want to get the best product he or she can get from a set of employees, so he's going to hire people with proven abilities and training, if not experience. Hiring isn't an exact science, which is why idiots get hired, and institutions' dynamics aren't always predictable, which is why you get the occasional faker with a byline.

Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" book contributes a thought: He famously argues that you need to spend 10,000 hours on an endeavor to be really successful at it. There's a lot more to success than spending time, but it's true that even if you're talented, you can't do well without serious practice. (If it were otherwise, I'd have a whole shelf of novels and children's books to my name.) Most people who put 10,000 hours into something are going to be committed to doing it well and to getting paid, and most likely will qualify as professionals.

From the point of view of the law and the public officials, the people with press privileges are going to be chosen arbitrarily -- all we of the public can insist on is that the criteria be reasonable and applied fairly. Employment by an established organization is the most common and widely accepted credential. For everyone else, there are hearings and "town hall" meetings. An official might be entitled to limit access to himself -- there are only so many hours in a day, and there's work to be done.

From the point of view of the public, I think we want to get as much information on any topic as we can -- though I think we strongly prefer to have it presented in an easy-to-grasp manner. I think that's why people like forums and blog comments -- because they extend, challenge and validate the main content of a site. I don't think, however, that most people have the time or the patience to plod through hundreds of comments just to dig out some minor point of the news. And I don't think people give much credibility to someone who can't get a point across coherently.

Doug and Peter will notice that I am begging a question -- how are American media going to support themselves if there's not enough ad money to go around? I think it's irrelevant to the "who's a journalist" question, for one thing, and unanswerable, for another. All we can do with media economics for the time being is to throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks. But I can say this: I'm not going to throw MY money at a news source that depends solely on volunteer contributors. I've seen 'em, and I'm still looking for one I can trust.

[Powderhorn]

For simplicity's sake, I'd like to define "journalist" as anyone who regularly collects and reports facts for general publication in a timely way.

Due respect, Pete, but you've just cut copy editors from the list. Are you saying reporters are the only journalists?

[Pete Zicari]

I WAS trying for simplicity in the context of the argument above, but we do a good deal of meta-reporting by finding the nuggets of news in the dross set before us and writing headlines about it, and we're inevitably part of the publishing process. I can't speak to whether copy editors as a group are regular, but I think we do do journalism, and as the bumper sticker says, do it with style.

[editer]

Try "selects, collects and presents information" and you have the editing process again.

[editer]

Edited to add: Peter's posts remind me of the long-running memes on Testy Copy Editors that a) journalism schools are pretty much worthless and b) journalism should be left to the professionals.

Where the culture of professionalism, and the professionals themselves, would come from without J-schools is left as an exercise for the reader.

Editer, that strikes me as a false paradox. You seem to be suggesting that anyone who holds one extreme must necessarily reject the opposite extreme.

I'm saying that I know a few people who hold both views but haven't bothered to reconcile them.

The apprenticeship system you describe has all but disappeared from the legacy news media. Nowadays people are gaining experience writing for Web sites, frequently their own. I like to refer to Talking Points Memo a lot; it's the exemplar. Sure, Josh Marshall didn't go to J-school (he has a Ph.D. in history) but he also didn't work for any newspapers to learn the ropes either. And his citizen journalism has been more than a little bit important in the past several years.

So where do these non-citizen journalists come from these days? Most are hired from journalism schools. (OK, no one's hiring these days. But the ones we have mostly came from J-schools.) Take away the journalism schools and what do you have? Young people who want to learn the ropes have to do it themselves, as Marshall and his crew did.

While it's not necessary to have a j-school degree, journalists should meet certain standards of competence and responsibility. These standards have traditionally been enforced by an editorial screening process. "Citizen journalism" by its very nature tends to eschew that "filter" and abandon those standards.

You seem to be suggesting that the Wise Men of Journalism must give their approval before any act of informing the public can be allowed to be taken seriously. How's that working out so far? The Wise Men of Journalism have not distinguished themselves with their success.

As a reader, I find "citizen journalism" to be almost always a complete waste of my time. The writing is usually dreadful and full of spelling errors, and the information worthlessly unreliable. For me as a consumer and citizen, useful news coverage -- with starkly few exceptions -- is only possible when performed by people who do it for a living and are held accountable for their work.

Then limit yourself to the legacy news media. Because, after all, they are the only ones who know what they're doing, right? They know how to spell! They get paid! They know The Way Journalism Works. And thus they know more than you or I, and should have our exclusive attention. Right? You'll never see another misspelled word or dangling participle or uncultured prose. And if the hideously overworked reporters and editors at the other end actually find time to follow up leads and check their information, it might be accurate and useful. But don't bet the rent.

To paraphrase Clay Shirky, a lot of folks don't care that they've seen "citizen journalism" work in practice because they already know that it can't work in theory. That's the mindset I'm fighting against.

[dfisher]

While we argue about who is a "journalist," those around us are proceeding to do journalism in one form or another, whether you like it or not.

You may find it a waste of time, Peter, but many people don't. I find reading much of my local paper a waste of time these days. I get better information on state government, for instance, from several "citizen" bloggers who have held state political positions and are quite well plugged in - triangulating their work almost always produces a bull's eye. Meanwhile, the state capital paper seems to think state government only exists (primarily) when the legislature is in session or when there is a budget crisis, and then the reporting (except for one outstanding editorial columnist who was a former Statehouse reporter) is largely superficial. Basically, the paper IDs two or three issues it thinks should be important every session and then beats the crap out of them.

The point is, some excellent journalists have come up through the ranks without "formal" edyacashun, and many have come out of schools with backgrounds other than journalism and many have come out of journalism schools, too. So if we want to argue that that makes j-school education suspect, we could argue it makes all the other avenues suspect, too.

Each has its own usefulness. I think j-school helps a certain type of student who may not be sure, or who is searching for a particular niche to be passionate about.

BTW, I did not come out of j-school. I was an astrophysics major who walked by the campus radio station one day and, looking for something to do other than read datasets, walked in. The station needed someone to read news, and it happened to be the era of the Vietnam draft, so I could watch the numbers come out on the AP and UPI machines and tell all my friends before they heard it elsewhere (and I'd done the high school newspaper thing). Slowly, I got hooked.

My mother, god bless her, had demanded I take two majors (she wasn't convinced about this astrophysics thing, and since my dad had died when I was 8 and I was going to get only one shot at college, and then only by working numerous jobs ...), so I doubled up in poli sci (figured the math carried over to all the survey work).

Well, once I got hooked at the campus carrier-current station, I auditioned for a spot at the "big" university station and got it. And then, because there was a j-school, I was able to take a couple of classes with Dick Yoakam. That did it. I switched my major from astrophysics to ... economics (again, I had all the math) along with poli sci. Not journalism.

In the meantime, I was covering the return of the deserters from Canada for Westinghouse Broadcasting, was doing a documentary on religious deprogramming, etc. And no, I didn't have a j-degree, or any degree yet, for that matter. But had there not been a j-school, there may well not have been a Yoakam, and ...etc.

I decided after I'd been doing it for a decade for radio, TV and newspaper that maybe I ought to go back and get a j-degree. And what I learned in j-school at that point added greatly to the next 20 years of my journalism life at the wire service and to what I do today.

My point is that arguing about what constitutes "citizen" journalism and who should be a journalist really is quite pointless. Some people will be thrust into it by events, others by a passion for one or two things, others by a voyeuristic urge and other by all the "right" things as us "big" journalists deem them. I've seen a fair amount of dross, for instance, on the community news site (hartsvilletoday.com) that we operate. Yet there also has been some gold that probably would not have gotten out any other way.

After the initial rush of "cit-j," I think we will see people be a bit more discerning - I think we're seeing it already. But the very nature of the Web, and the search-based nature of finding info on it, which you are not going to change, means the citizen with some expertise is as likely to be given a look by the public as is the MSM. And I know that's annoying as hell to trad journalists, but they're just going to have to learn to deal with it.

You know, law wasn't all that different, but we tend to forget that. Even until well into the last century, some states still allowed legal secretaries and others who had "studied" law by working at it, to take the bar exam. That pretty much stopped when a) those "citizen" lawyers were beating those who had spent all that money going to those fancy law schools and b) the ABA became an enforcer of scarcity. Of course, journalists never have had to take state-sanctioned tests, and that will always be where the comparison with other "professions" breaks down. Still, I think you can see the parallels, and we might well ask the same question: Is law school worth it?

The terminology, cit-j, is unfortunate. Most of the "citizens" I don't think are doing journalism; they are doing news, thrust into the role of reporter by events. The "journalism," following-up with probing questions, relentlessly chasing down a lead, is still a professional thing.

We tend to lump the two, but I can assure you, those "citizens" know the difference. When we started Hartsville Today, we purposely called it a community news site and not journalism. Why? Because many of the people we talked to who were to become contributors made clear from the beginning that they didn't want to be "journalists." They had stories to tell, but they recognized -- and respected -- what they could do and what we do. Time and time again, they made the distinction, though one of them became a pretty damn good reporter and now has her own newspaper column.

Dang, another "citizen journalist" infiltrating our ranks. What's to be done?

[Powderhorn]

Take away the journalism schools and what do you have? Young people who want to learn the ropes have to do it themselves, as Marshall and his crew did.

To address the first question, the University of Washington had gutted its J-school when I was there. What did we have? A newsroom of 150, officially, but perhaps 15 core players. And few of the core were masscomm ... we did it because we loved it.

As Doug alluded to, I was actually a computer science major (switched to linguistics -- still no degree), and had no interest in getting into journalism, but for the fact the the paper paid. Well.

And then I fell into page design and the desk was atrocious, so all of us on the design desk took to playing copy editor, and a decade later, here I am.

In a small town such as this, there are people making full-on attempts to commit journalism, but the flip side of small-town living is that people in the know can't actually provide impartial information. Even though I've only been here three months, there are impediments for me, as well. I didn't end up here on accident, and as such must recuse myself from certain stories.

It may be true that the in-the-know folk provide more juicy, factual or interesting stories, but simply being in the know is not the mark of a solid reporter. Yes, it may be the best report, with the most inside information, but at what cost? When does access become a liability? That's where citizen journalism fails, IMHO. When you're reporting on your friends ... well, great info, but what's the angle?

As an assigning editor, I look for stringers knowledgeable in their fields, but the same issue rears its head: Are they too close to their sources? Citizen journalism may have a future, and I suspect more so in smaller areas, but are personal connections what gets us the news? Or professional connections?

I don't think the "backlash" against bloggers and the like is because we're afraid of anything, but because, too often, people are doing the right thing for the wrong reason, when it comes to citizen journalism. I did a number of interviews this fall wherein the interview was mostly done and the sources said, "Now, I don't want to see this in the paper, but ..." and I put my notebook away and after that it was sacrosanct. I don't think people without some training understand when sources are giving you the pulse without attribution -- and instead try to build on something that should never have been a topic.

[Peter Fisk]

@Editer

Just curious -- how do you define "citizen journalism" and how does TPM meet that definition? Doesn't Josh Marshall have a full-time paid staff?

What about Politico.com -- is that citizen journalism? Or is it simply an example of the dreaded "MSM" successfully transitioning to an online venue?

What's the difference between (a) an edited, well-reported news-breaking blog post by a paid staffer and (b) an old-fashioned "MSM" news story posted online?

Is NYT.com a part of the "Blogosphere"?

-----


@Doug

Hartsville Today looks fairly useful as an online bulletin board for the locals, but I'm sorry, I can't imagine wading through all that stuff every day looking for anything that would resemble what I as a reader would consider credible, reliable, worthwhile news reporting.

----------------------------------------------------
minor edit to fix typo: <strike>image</strike> = imagine

[dfisher]

Well, Peter, then you would have missed the dustup over the city sign inspectors demanding that churches take down their vacation bible school signs -- it was posted as a news story about 10 a.m. one day as the inspectors were visiting. By 5 p.m., the city had backed down. The paper, a twice-weekly with whom we cooperated in establishing this site, was never in a position to cover it, but it drew lots of concern and traffic.

Or you would have missed the story about a busy road where people were forced to cross the road to get to their mailboxes. USPS would not, supposedly, budge. Story hit, USPS changed mind.

Or look in the education area with some of the issues raised and how the school's spokeswoman has answered them.

And I have other examples, plus the fact that the twice-weekly paper uses the site as well to post things between press runs.

No, Peter, it is not polished journalism, and there is a fair amount of dross in-between.

But you completely miss the point with your unfortunate dismissive comments. This is not a substitute for "J"ournalism. It is a supplement. Too many news orgs have unfortunately treated cit-j as a turn-it-on-and-leave-it type of thing. As we said last year in Denver, those sites often fail. Online community building takes nurturing and sometimes policing. But these kinds of sites have a place or they wouldn't flourish -- instead everyone would be reading the newspaper or flocking to the newspaper's Web site, now wouldn't they?

I guess the people of Hartsville have a greater imagination than you. More than 1,300 of them are registered users, and our tracking shows 3k-5k uniques a month (sometimes as high as 10k), with time on site far greater than your average newspaper site. (And we know there are more getting it only through RSS.)

And it's in a market area of 20k. I know publishers who would sell their mothers for numbers like that.

People vote with their feet -- or their mouse clicks, Peter. You can be as dismissive as you want, but it seems to me vast swaths of our public are dismissing us. The object is to recognize what is happening and try to use the best parts of it to advance journalism. HVTD is an experiment to uncover the good, bad and ugly -- and we have (you can find the first year report on my blog http://commonsensej.blogspot.com and the second-year assessment at Grassroots Editor, Winter 2008 http://www.mssu.edu/iswne/grpdfs/winter08.pdf.)

[editer]

@Editer

Just curious -- how do you define "citizen journalism" and how does TPM meet that definition? Doesn't Josh Marshall have a full-time paid staff?

I don't have a set definition of citizen journalism.

Josh Marshall started out in late 2000 as "a guy with a Web site". It was a while before he was making a living from the site and before he could hire other folks. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I think he did a donation drive so he could go to New Hampshire to cover the 2004 primary there, and only started adding staff after that. Even today he sometimes uses crowdsourcing (a much underrated form of citizen journalism) to gather information; the important work he did on the U.S. attorney firings, for instance, would not have been possible without a lot of folks out in flyover country who just wanted to share information.

What about Politico.com -- is that citizen journalism? Or is it simply an example of the dreaded "MSM" successfully transitioning to an online venue?

Politico started out as a small but well-capitalized endeavor with paid staff and mainstream journalists (from the WaPo, IIRC), so I wouldn't call it "citizen journalism". It appears to have a useful business model, though from a content perspective it's about as innovative as CNN.

What's the difference between (a) an edited, well-reported news-breaking blog post by a paid staffer and (b) an old-fashioned "MSM" news story posted online?

The first probably fits the medium better. The second is still likely to be shovelware these days. Beyond that, no difference that I can see. So what?

Is NYT.com a part of the "Blogosphere"?

I'd say its blogs are. But so what? We were talking about citizen journalism. What does the "Blogosphere" have to do with it? Do you believe blogs and Journalism can't mix?

[Peter Fisk]

@Editor: My point is that much of what is cited as worthwhile citizen journalism is actually "mainstream" vocational journalism that happens to take place on the web, as if the argument were print-vs.-online, rather than quality-vs.-crap.

[editer]

@Editor: My point is that much of what is cited as worthwhile citizen journalism is actually "mainstream" vocational journalism that happens to take place on the web, as if the argument were print-vs.-online, rather than quality-vs.-crap.

You built a straw man. I don't care what (you think) other people cite as "worthwhile citizen journalism". I never mentioned Politico; who has called that operation "citizen journalism"? Who has said that about the NYT's blogs? For that matter, who's saying it about any professional journalism, as you allege?

Frankly, after reading your arguments in this thread, I wouldn't trust you to distinguish quality from crap.

[Peter Fisk]

You built a straw man. I don't care what (you think) other people cite as "worthwhile citizen journalism". I never mentioned Politico; who has called that operation "citizen journalism"? Who has said that about the NYT's blogs? For that matter, who's saying it about any professional journalism, as you allege?

Frankly, after reading your arguments in this thread, I wouldn't trust you to distinguish quality from crap.

You missed the point (even though I stated it explicitly upon your request).

And your ad hominem swipe is unworthy of further response. ... Hey Doug, that goes for you too.

[dfisher]

Hardly ad hominem when responding directly to your arguments and tone.

BTW, a slightly different take on cit-J from someone else in the biz:
http://www.newstechzilla.com/2009/01/newspapers-broke-my-heart-will-citizen-journalism-heal-it-by-trent-seibert/

Phil Bronstein had some interesting comments on CNN's "Reliable Sources": http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0901/04/rs.01.html

And I'd just invite folks to watch the first episode of Lou Grant on Hulu. http://www.hulu.com/watch/677/lou-grant-cophouse

Pay close attention to how Grant is treated with he's just a member of the hoi polloi. (Mrs. Pynchon's little tirade about the business is also useful as are several other parts.)

It makes you wonder how a couple of TV writers were so perceptive about our business before we were.