New social media tools empower citizen journalism
New social media tools empower citizen journalism
Rob Lever July 16, 2016
Washington (AFP) - It may be inside a protest rally, or
in front of a deadly shooting. Smartphones, video and social media are
empowering citizens to tell their stories like never before.
This became clear with the live video earlier this month
from Diamond Reynolds when she captured the aftermath of the shooting by a
police officer of her boyfriend Philando Castile in Minnesota and streamed it
live on Facebook.
The unprecedented live feed was just the latest in a
series of events highlighting the power of citizen journalists to bring to
light events and viewpoints that would otherwise not be part of mainstream
media.
Citizen journalism has been around for centuries, but
each technological advance has made it easier to reach more people, said
Valerie Belair-Gagnon, who heads the Yale University Information Society
Project and is an incoming professor of journalism at the University of
Minnesota.
Prominent examples from the past include the 1963
Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination and the 1991 beating by Los Angeles
police of Rodney King and the events of the Arab Spring.
More recently, citizen videos offered immediate and
intimate perspectives from Thursday's truck attack in the southern French city
of Nice and the 2015 rampage in Paris, as well as dozens of citizen
confrontations with police in the United States.
"In each case, a new technology prompted us to be
aware that citizens can contribute journalism in certain ways," Belair-Gagnon
said.
"In the shift we are seeing since 2004, citizen
media is becoming fully integrated to journalism."
Belair-Gagnon said the rise of citizen journalism is not
necessarily negative for the mainstream media.
"For me, it's a positive story because journalists
are not the only gatekeepers," she told AFP.
"The fact that the public or citizens are able to
gather information and distribute it to the public provides an opportunity for
richer storytelling."
- Democratizing media -
Jeff Achen, executive editor of the Minnesota nonprofit
group The UpTake, which trains citizen journalists, said the latest incidents
show a "democratization" of the news media.
"Media can't be everywhere, but there is something
with a citizen telling their own story from their own perspective which can be
very valuable."
Achen, a former television and print report, said citizen
journalism won't necessarily replace traditional media but may augment it.
"With the legacy media, some of the news can feel
manufactured and manipulated. It can feel corporate sponsored," he said.
Citizens can enhance journalism's traditional role of
holding powerful institutions like the police accountable.
Platforms such as Twitter's Periscope and Facebook Live,
which allow anyone to broadcast an event, can create "excitement" in
this effort, said Achen.
"I think this will become more prevalent," he
added.
"Everyone is going to make it routine. They will
take out their cellphones whenever a police officer pulls over and does
something" to bear witness to the facts, Achen said.
Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the ability for citizens to
reach the masses can help drive social change.
"Powerful as these videos are for mobilizing
activists, they may be more powerful in bringing new participants into the
racial justice movement," he said in a blog post.
- Change accelerating -
Dan Gillmor, an Arizona State University professor and
author of a book on citizen journalism, said Reynolds "changed our
perception of media" with the "shocking and heartbreaking real-time
web video of the last minutes of Philando Castile's life."
Gillmor said the Reynolds video was not necessarily
something new but showed "the velocity of change is accelerating" in
citizen news production. "Her video was a three-faceted act: witnessing,
activism and journalism," Gillmor said in a blog post.
"Even though few people saw it in real time, she was
saving it to the data cloud in real time, creating and -- one hopes --
preserving a record of what may or may not be judged eventually to have been a
crime by a police officer. What Reynolds did was brave, and important for all
kinds of reasons."
Gillmor said Reynolds "taught the rest of us
something vital: We all have an obligation to witness and record some things
even if we are not directly part of what's happening."
These events also raise questions about how platforms
such as Facebook respond to their role as conduits for citizen journalism.
Facebook's role came into question when it briefly took
down Reynolds video, before restoring it.
Gillmor and others argue that the event underscores that
Facebook is part of the news industry, despite its claim to be a neutral
platform.
"Facebook hasn't given a plausible explanation for
its initial removal of Reynolds' video," Gillmor said.
"The point is that the video remains visible because
Facebook allows it to be visible."
Gillmor added that it is "enormously dangerous that
an enormously powerful enterprise can decide what free speech will be. I don't
want a few people's whims in Menlo Park overruling the First Amendment and
other free speech 'guarantees.'"
Comments
Post a Comment