Posted by Sarah F.
Orting is a small town southeast of Tacoma that I had never heard of. Its longtime weekly newspaper, The Gazette, stopped publishing at the end of March. To remedy the lack of news coverage and try a new business venture, a community member launched Orting News, which solicits articles and content created by citizens of the town.
The Seattle Times wrote a really nice commentary piece on how the site got started. But the column ended with:
The Orting News isn’t journalism …
Seriously? Why isn’t it journalism?
My reaction is that The Seattle Times has an outdated and kind of elitist definition of journalism. Granted, the content that you find on Orting News is rather fluffy – there is a lot of buzz about how the Fourth of July celebration is shaping up. But there are also some stories on there that I think would be the sort of thing that you would find in any community newspaper. This site really reminds me of the MCDM’s favorite hyperlocal endeavor, The West Seattle Blog.
I know we’ve talked a lot about whether UGC can be classified as journalism – but what do you guys think?
Is Orting News journalism – or is The Seattle Times correct in its labeling?
Whether Orting news is journalism or not is a very interesting issue, Sarah. I think, professional journalists today have mixed feelings toward citizen journalism. Obviously they see the citizen media as a threat that could reduce their job opportunity. Also, like you said, many professional journalists have an elitist definition of journalism. However, professional journalists criticism toward the citizen blogs is almost like outcries of dinosaurs.
Journalists feel a frustration that is rational, aimed toward the rigidness that citizen journalism often lack….Some citizen journalists, mostly bloggers, do not pay enough attention to the preciseness of the facts and the data in their articles. And to make things worse, there is no function to check those mistakes. In the world of serious journalism, editors take all the responsibility about the article, from confirming the facts to checking the spellings. Making a major mistake could be fatal both to his career as well as the reputation of the media.
Jerry Large, The Seattle Times writer, was pointing out the lack of this function in Orting News. “If readers have a disagreement, he’s not playing referee. Responses go directly to the writer.” I guess this is why he concluded that Orting News was not journalism. If they were responsible for news, he would call Orting News journalism.
I agree.
There definition of journalism is outdated and elitist.
According to the latest (today’s) news Thomson Reuters Corp plans to cut 140 editorial jobs by the end of the year.
Why would they do that?
Interesting interview on The Daily Show that speaks to this debate.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=168063&title=david-perlmutter