The weekend forecast in Middletown, NY, called for massive rains. If those rains turned to flooding, Erik Gliedman, online content coordinator for Middletown’s Times Herald-Record newspaper, wanted to be ready.
“Since we don’t have a large number of staff photographers,” Gliedman said, “I knew if there was flooding, we would only be able to capture a small part of it while it was happening.” To help cover what turned out to be the worst flood in half a century, Gliedman turned to an unusual source: the newspaper’s readers.
From small community newspapers to national and international news operations, mainstream media is beginning to turn to citizen journalism to help expand and enhance coverage.
“One of the defining features of the Internet is interactivity,” said William Femia, blogs editor for MSNBC.com. “We are constantly looking for ways to take advantage of that in presenting the news.” Readers and viewers of MSNBC, the BBC and other traditional news outlets have contributed hundreds of eyewitness accounts, photos and videos for events ranging from the December 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia to the April 2005 death of Pope John Paul II.
On Sunday, April 3, 2005, six inches of rain deluged the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York in less than 24 hours. The rushing waters washed out roads, destroyed homes and displaced 1,300 residents of Orange and Sullivan Counties. Local Times Herald-Record readers, responding to requests Gliedman posted on the paper’s website and in Friday’s print edition, sent the paper a torrent of firsthand accounts and photos.
“Since our readers are out there and experiencing [the flood] firsthand, I felt they were the best source for this type of coverage,” Gliedman said. He had solicited reader photos for previous, less damaging floods; this time he expanded his request to include videos and set up a special area of the paper’s Web message boards for flood accounts.
By the time the waters receded, Gliedman had received three digital videos, 400 reader photos (300 of which appeared on the paper’s flood Web site) and 100 message-board posts from readers who’d weathered the flood.
Despite the weather hazards, readers seemed to enjoy taking part in the paper’s coverage, Gliedman said. A week after the flood, readers continued to e-mail him photos of affected areas not yet covered by the paper. The paper’s special flood Web site, especially the hundreds of reader photos, helped to double recordonline.com’s usual traffic.
“I was very surprised and pleased at the number of responses,” Gliedman said. “If the flooding was bad, I thought maybe we would reach 100 photo submissions. But 400 photos blew me away.”
Gliedman isn’t the only journalist to underestimate the public’s eagerness to help report the news. “On the whole, we continue to be surprised at how much greater the response is than we expected,” said Femia, who oversees MSNBC.com’s Citizen Journalists Report section.
Since the November 2004 U.S. presidential election, MSNBC.com has posted a series of “assignments” for its readers, soliciting written accounts, photos and video of national and world events. When Pope John Paul II died in April 2005, tens of thousands of readers sent in recollections of past meetings with the pontiff, eyewitness accounts from his funeral and their own photos of the Pope, Femia said. MSNBC.com ultimately published 25 reader photos and nine pages of citizen-journalist accounts in its coverage of John Paul II’s death.
The Citizen Journalist site lets MSNBC.com harness the newsgathering skills of an audience that is more widespread and far-reaching than its corps of professional correspondents. When the tsunami hit Asia in December 2004, Femia said, even readers whose countries weren’t covered by MSNBC.com posted photos and firsthand reports.
“Our biggest challenge in publishing Citizen Journalist reports is sorting through them all and finding the most suitable ones,” he said. Most of MSNBC’s citizen journalists submit text accounts, Femia said, though a surprising number have begun to send photos as well. “So far, video has been the smallest contribution,” he said. “It’s often the case that submissions will be weak until we show an example—then they come flooding in. I expect that once we get a few more video submissions, people will begin to understand what is worth submitting.”
Citizen journalism works well as one part of a larger spectrum of coverage, Femia said, but it’s not a replacement for traditional reporting. “The value of a citizen journalist is often in the specificity of their experience,” he said. “Readers have a certain freedom to report on their own perspective without concern for the big picture.”
Though Femia occasionally edits reports for grammar and style—”some submissions could use a little help,” he said—he tries to keep alterations to a minimum. “I like the character of the misspellings or choppy English of a letter from a non-English speaker,” he said. “At the same time, our goal is not to embarrass the writer, by leaving in grammatical errors.
Femia and his fellow editors are learning how to fine-tune their assignments to get the best possible reader responses. “Two main skill points we’ve come to appreciate [are] asking the right question and timing it when news breaks,” he said.
In the meantime, they’ve been working with the rest of MSNBC.com to streamline the technical aspects of posting citizen reports and more closely integrate those accounts with the rest of the site’s news. “Professional reporters may be able to better develop their own stories and find more tips and leads to follow with the aid of civilian reporters,” Femia said.
In crafting its own citizen journalism effort, MSNBC.com took its cues in part from other news organizations, large and small, Femia said. One of the greatest influences was the BBC, which is preparing to expand its already-thriving citizen journalism initiative.
The BBC has experimented with citizen journalism since the 1980s, according to research executive Lucy Hooberman. Its current Video Nation site, inviting British citizens to create short movies for the Web, began as a television series that sprang from a BBC effort to offer ordinary people tools to participate in the media.
Presently, the BBC’s largest citizen journalism effort is Have Your Say, which lets citizens throughout the UK and around the world post their opinions on a regularly updated stable of current events topics, from stem cells to singing contests. Posts to Have Your Say following the Asian tsunami became a significant portion of BBC News’ coverage of the event. Some families were even reunited with loved ones thanks to citizen posts on the BBC’s site.
In an April 2005 interview with the Hypergene media blog, BBC Global News Director Richard Sambrook discussed plans to further expand the BBC’s embrace of citizen journalism by training its audience to help cover the news.
Since 2001, Sambrook said, the BBC has held local workshops in media production, teaching ordinary citizens how to create video and audio news and feature stories. The results appear on BBC’s TV news and Telling Lives website. The BBC also provides a forum for activism and civic participation on its iCan site, which gives concerned citizens resources to get involved in local and national issues.
The BBC is now embarking on an initiative dubbed the “Global Conversation,” which Sambrook said “will change the way we report the news and how we find and develop news stories.” Though vague on specifics, Sambrook described a massive effort to tie together the BBC’s TV, radio and Web news outlets, and allow the BBC’s audience to communicate with its reporters and contribute to its reports via multiple media. A report on the BBC’s future lists one early example of the new initiative: Africa Live, a program that lets Africans discuss the continent’s issues via phone, e-mail and text messaging.
In the interview, Sambrook said that the BBC’s nonprofit status has freed it to pursue citizen journalism efforts without worrying about turning a profit. “We can afford to take risks, by focusing purely on the public value of a new service, that a commercial broadcaster can’t,” he said.
“The value the British public get from the BBC should go beyond what we broadcast,” Sambrook said. “Facilitating what our audiences want to do is going to become increasingly important as the conventional passive relationship between broadcaster and audience breaks down.”
Traditional media outlets increasingly seem to be heeding that message and reaping its rewards. According to MSNBC.com’s Femia, citizen journalism has the potential to engage audiences while improving mass media’s news coverage.
“CJ reaches everyone with an Internet connection,” Femia said. “That’s hard to beat.”
