Gillmor on citizen media's effects on business, culture

Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Arizona State University, US. Powered by Nokia.

The media and how it works has been transformed in recent times with the advent of social media and has shifted from one-to-many communications to being more democratized, allowing participation in the form of production and access. In the past, a media model of creation and distribution dominated; in today's world, media consumers have become producers as well as collaborators in the business world through social media tools such as blogs.

Conversational world

Gillmor, who had just returned from Highway Africa in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, described today's world as a conversational one. Those who were once purely consumers have been given the production tools to contribute to today's media through citizen journalism. He cited the tsunami disaster of 2004, where tourists provided coverage of the actual event with amateur photographs of the destruction. The blogosphere, according to Gillmor, consists of not just a "me and my" concept where people blog about their personal lives, but a "we and our" concept through the sharing of content that affects societies.

"People are committing random acts of journalism and I don't know where it fits exactly in any kind of organisatonal chart... it's more ecosystem than organisation," he said.

He used www.Ushahidi.com, the website that covered the violence in Kenya during the post-election period of early January 2008, as an example of citizen journalism, where a combination of media including RSS, mobile media and mapping was used as a means for ordinary citizens to share personal experiences for a collective cause. In discussing issues and arguing opinions, comments essentially become content, said Gillmor.

Random acts of journalism

Gillmor asked the question, "How do we define journalism in today's world?" While miscellaneous, arbitrary content dominates the web, there are random acts of journalism that are committed by people who are not necessarily journalists in the traditional sense. He used an economic professor's blog, containing thought-leading information on the economy, as an example. While the blog is opinionated, he reasoned that this dissemination of information does border on journalism since it does serve as a source of valuable information.

"If you publish on the web you are creating media, and some media is closer to journalism than others but there is a lot that is in the information space that is pretty close."

"I want to also emphasise, this is about 'and' and not 'or'. People constantly ask me [if] bloggers are journalists and of course the answer to that is another question, which is, 'So are you asking if people who write on paper are journalists?' Blogging is a tool; it's software. Most bloggers are not journalists... ones who are, are some of the great journalists... It's about an expanding ecosystem, a more diverse, robust ecosystem of media. Instead of a few players controlling the news, lots of people have access, both to reports from wide sources as well as creating their own and talking about it," he said.

Changed the rules

The evolution of media has in turn changed the rules for newsmakers. It is becoming increasingly harder to keep secrets because of personal media. "Transparency is more relevant than ever before," said Gillmor. Another effect on the media landscape is the falling ad revenue for journalism; ads that used to be in newspapers can now be found on sites like eBay. "The ad system is being systematically separated from journalism," said Gillmor.

He noted that it is now inexpensive to become a journalistic entrepreneur as innovation is cheap through the media of micro-publishing and citizen reports: "With inexpensive tools... you can create a media product or service... In fact, the main cost by far is your time, and that has profound implications, but I believe the one most important thing for journalism is that entrepreneurship is now possible in ways that were much harder in the past. My goal at Arizona State is to convince students that they can invent their own jobs and then help them do it and, they may have to."

Newsrooms are now converging, database journalism is widespread, and staff blogs/comments are popping up. With the birth of Web 2.0, from data to services, just about everything is connected. We have multimedia combinations and journalistic commentary, where journalism has moved away from being seen as an oracle to being more of a guide.

So how do we make the best of this new media? According to Gillmor, we suddenly have, on hand, a "portal to the best of others' work." Sending users away to other places that are useful to them should bring them back. A prime example of this theory is Google. Gillmor pointed out, however, that in the end it boils down to reputation, as popularity is not enough. The consumer will always return when you send them away to another source, depending, though, on the reputation of the person that is doing the recommending.

"The web is about something much different than creating a walled garden where you keep people; in fact, it's quite the opposite. In a networked economy you're sending them out because it's what they want, it's what they deserve and it's their data, not your data."

Benefit of new media

Another benefit of new media is citizen journalism helping to investigate and cover breaking news stories as journalists are not always at the right place at the right time. Gillmor used www.Bild.de, a German celebrity news website that compensates people, not on its employee list, when they send in their snap shots and pieces.

However, new media has brought with it dilemmas of credibility and accuracy. The age of Photoshop and its possibilities means consumers need to be sceptical of everything. There has even been talk of bloggers being paid to write about certain things in a favourable or not so favourable light.

Gillmor's conclusion to the discussion was that the proliferation of new media sources, eventually leading to a consolidation phase, could only benefit society.

• Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where he is involved in helping to create a culture of innovation and risk-taking in journalism education, and in the wider media world. He is also the school's Kauffman Professor of digital media entrepreneurship, as well as the director of the Center for Citizen Media, a joint project with ASU and Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. For more on Gillmor, go to www.dangillmor.com.