Few neologisms created so recently and in a spirit of such high idealism have ended up so debased so quickly as the practice known as citizen journalism. Type the term into Google and you’ll be confronted with a rat’s nest of some of the most noxious people around.
What happened?
Some argue that the practice of citizen journalism – informing your community of events it needs to know about without financial remuneration – predates any idea of journalism as a profession. That may be true, but the more recent version began as a mildly utopian but not entirely unrealistic attempt to democratise media, give voice to the unrepresented and harness the power of new technologies by turning bystanders into eyewitness reporters on events that previously would have remained unseen.
If citizen journalism predated the internet, it was the internet that ushered in its heyday, giving everyone who wanted it the opportunity to gather information, express ideas and publish the results without any need for an intermediary (or money).
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The first wave began with newsgroups, which begat web logs, which became blogs, which over the course of a decade or so, between the late 1990s and the late 2000s, gave rise to a flourishing ecosystem of commentary, reportage and creative writing. As the technology became more sophisticated, and individual writers began to build substantial audiences, blogging started to impinge on the collective consciousness of what was not yet called legacy media. Slowly (often very slowly) some of its styles and tactics started cropping up on newspaper websites, such as the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section. The best bloggers brought a freshness and immediacy that contrasted with the staid formality of much professional journalism. The worst traded in deranged conspiracy theories and worse. Which would win out?
Algorithms and human nature combined to incentivise some types of journalism over others. A million citizen opinion columnists. Zero citizen court reporters
Some bloggers used the form as a springboard to a more conventional career in journalism. Others went on to other forms of writing. And some built their blogs into fully fledged stand-alone media operations. In a way blogging was a victim of its own success as its first and second generations moved on to other things. But it might have survived longer and mutated into something more interesting had it not been for the arrival of social media. Twitter, in particular, gained a vice-like grip on the attention of journalists and wannabe journalists alike. The 400-word post became the 140-character tweet. Memes became a thing. Going viral became another thing.
At the time none of this seemed a problem. On the contrary, the arrival of social media and the smartphone appeared to presage an exciting era. Revolution was in the air. The Arab Spring showed how, with smartphones in their hands, a new generation could mobilise and distribute information about what was happening on their streets.
There has always been a blurred line between advocacy and reporting, and that was even more true of citizen journalism. In its early days it was closely associated with what one theorist defined as a “radical challenge to the professionalised and institutionalised practices of the mainstream media”. One of its most bracing genres was the media takedown, which deconstructed the language, the underlying assumptions and sometimes the reporting standards deployed by the mainstream. Most of this energy came from the left, although, as always with the internet, there was a libertarian streak too. But the “alternative” tag reflected where the majority’s sentiments lay.
But it became more and more apparent that algorithms and human nature combined to incentivise some types of journalism over others. A million citizen opinion columnists. Zero citizen court reporters.
As the noughties slipped into the teens, in the wake of the financial crash, both the medium and the message began to turn sour. In Ireland this became apparent during the water-charge protests of 2014. Shoving a phone in someone’s face and shouting aggressive questions became an activist tactic thinly disguised as “citizen journalism”.
Now those same tactics are the preserve of right-wing provocateurs, who loudly claim that their “citizen journalist” status somehow gives them additional rights to remain in confrontational situations. Meanwhile, the bloggers are gone, the Indymedia types have found other hobbies and even the media-takedown crew seem to have lost interest. Half of social media is a sewer, while the other half is post-literate. Sadly, the dream of a community of disparate, dedicated unpaid individuals breaking stories for the common good seems to be over for good.
