The existence of citizen journalism is less of an organised effort, but rather a natural progression of the increasing tools of content creation being bestowed upon the ‘normal-person’. It seems less likely that the public has taken up a sudden interest in documentation, but rather the increasing affordances of tools such as social media and technology have lowered the barrier to entry.
It might be easy to argue that the comparative inexperience or professionalism of citizen journalism serves to diminish traditional journalism, but it’s still undeniable it has an important role to play. In China’s notoriously censored media-scape, information deemed ‘unpublishable’ by traditional media are de facto considered citizen journalism (Luo, Y & Harrison, T.M 2019), a potential attempt at devaluing its credibility. In areas like these, ‘citizen journalism’ may become the necessary determinant of the truth.
In some ways the discussion regarding citizen journalism is flawed by its focus and scope (Burns, A 2009). The term ‘citizen journalism’ often applies only to issues of political importance, or of a similar scope. Moving beyond this definition, citizen journalism arguably has a greater history than we’re led to believe. The spread of information through tight-knit communities can contain all the trappings of journalism once you omit its lack of political weight.
Germany’s myHeimat.de is a strong example of this idea. The site employs a hyperlocal focus (Burns, A 2009), requiring users to specify their home location (or their Heimatort) allowing the site to serve them user-generated from areas of relevance to them. The site of course does allow you to go beyond this scope, but first and foremost the site is centred around it’s hyperlocal approach.
“Relevance is the paramount driver of news consumption” (Schrøder, K.C 2019). It has often been speculated that audiences feel disconnected to a majority of news due to a lack of relevance to their own lives. Following this line of thinking, myHeimat offers a unique advantage to citizen journalism, namely its ability to generate and serve news individually relevant to audiences.
“…we really want those topics, too, which are specific to the [local] microcosm, because: the further away from the everyday world those topics are, the harder it is for the citizen reporter to communicate them.”
Martin Huber, myHeimat CEO
In this sense, myHeimat even has a considerable lack of journalistic background. Although, myHeimat CEO, Martin Huber cites this as one of the site’s strengths; “journalistically, content-wise, we stay out of it, and merely offer a platform which provides for elegant community exchange” (2008). The rise of social media has popularised the notion of the ‘democratisation of journalism’, but in many ways this idea is flawed. While large social media sites are more accessible to audiences, they’re often underpinned by the same profit incentives of traditional media. myHeimat’s hyperlocal focus to citizen journalism allows it to in some ways escape from this limitation.
References
Burns, A 2009, ‘Citizen Journalism and Everyday Life: A Case Study of Germany’s myHeimat.de’. In Future of Journalism Conference 2009.
Huber, M. (2008) Interviewed by Axel Burns. Munich, Germany, 29 Oct.
Luo, Y & Harrison, T.M 2019, ‘How citizen journalists impact the agendas of traditional media and the government policymaking process in China’, Global Media and China, vol. 4, no. 1
Schrøder, K.C 2019, What Do News Readers Really Want to Read About? How Relevance Works for News Audiences, Digital News Report, viewed 27 August 2021, <https://www.digitalnewsreport.org/publications/2019/news-readers-really-want-read-relevance-works-news-audiences/>
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