Interview With Jason Wilson
Jason Wilson is a professor of Journalism at the University of Canberra who was one of the researchers behind YouDecide2007, a citizen journalism project covering the 2007 federal election. We asked him about some of the lessons learnt during the project and other elements of his journalism research. The interview took place over the phone on the 8th of May 2012.
Starting with an easy question, how would you define citizen journalism?
I don't think it's that easy. I would say it's people using the tools that are available to them now in terms of self publishing technologies and sharing and collaboration technologies to really publish news and opinions in a way that perhaps short circuits the mainstream media. The mainstream media has functioned in the past as well, a medium, to mediate politicians and citizens. And as a mediator of news and opinions and it's just not necessary in this age of information abundance. And to a degree that's because people are able to get on and use these tools. It's people without any special training or institutional position getting on and using these kinds of tools to publish their own news and opinions.
You mentioned something that I wanted to talk about and that is that there is no longer a need for that mediation between citizens and politicians or newsmakers. Can you ever see a point where citizen journalism activity could replace professional journalism?
No... I mean, in the research we did that is certainly not what we were trying to say. I think the official news media will need to get used to and accomodate the fact that citizens now publish and can see that a lot of them sort of are doing that already. There will always be a roll for professional journalists or content makers or whatever you want to call them of some kind. Because ordinary folk don't have the kind of walk up skills, if you like, to publish online, even now, digital literacy is surprisingly low I always find, out there in the community. So there will always be a role for the professional journalist. I think that what we can also see is that people still turn to professional news media when there are big stories or when they want facts. I think that by and large the big successful online news enterprises are the ones that are connected with traditional media outlets. Although not everyone has adapted the ones that have have continued their success online. I don't think the media is going to disappear; I don't think it is going to be replaced in any simple sense by citizen journalists but there is much more information: many more images, much more text, much more video and audio being produced by citizens everyday now then there are by professional journalists or professional media workers. So the overall ecology - the system - is changing. I keep talking about that idea of information abundance. We're in this age of information abundance journalists and traditional media organisations or big media organisations have to adapt to that. I don't see it likely that they are going to disappear any time in the near future but their position, their place, their role has changed.
You mentioned the ecology, which was something that you wrote about with Terry Flew in the YouDecide 2007 report, which is what that is really fascinating us and the centre of our research. We're looking at the idea of 'open journalism' as a way to describe that ecology, or engagement with that ecology from journalists. And we want to look at how professional journalism can engage with all the alternative forms of journalism and particularly citizen journalism. What are your thoughts on that definition of open journalism?
That sounds good, it sounds like a different way of talking about it. I assume you mean opening up a bit more of a two way road between professional journalists and maybe utilising what citizen journalists do... could you explain it a bit more?
Well, we are actually having trouble explaining it. That certainly seems to be the hard part at the moment. We are looking at that intersection between professional journalism and citizen journalism and how they are going to interact in the future.
It's always difficult to predict the future. But I mean, if you look at a space like Twitter, and I know everyone talks about Twitter, but it's a really good example of a place where, if you look at last year's floods in Queensland for example, lots and lots of the information on the ground was coming from people who were using social media then journalists were relaying that or acting as sort of hubs in a bigger network that included ordinary people; taking information in and sort of distributing it out again. There was a kind of open relationship there. Information was coming in from people on the ground; coming into journalists and being redistributed to other people who needed to know it. I think in a space like Twitter you can see that relationship sort of happening already. And I think you can see other things happening too; like politicians and journalists if you want to talk about politics. Politicians and journalists communicating directly in public. There are all these new relationships, I guess, being bought about, particularly with social media. Politicians used to be the people that they reported on. The journalists used to be the main ones doing the reporting. Journalists will now be challenged by readers on Twitter or in social media. They'll talk directly to some politicians in public, they'll get news from ordinary people. There is an ever greater flow of information from different places.
I wanted to talk about, in particular, the role of the journalist in this environment. Because I feel we are definitely heading towards a space where citizen journalism is becoming increasingly common. Where people are reporting on events, and particularly local events, that journalists aren't aware of or can't be present at...
Yeah, we talked about local and regional coverage. There is no doubt that the mainstream media organisations have put their journalists under more and more pressure. There is no doubt that they are trying to do more with less, they're under resourced, they's a lot of rounds that probably aren't covered properly and there are regional areas or local news stories that pass them by because they just don't have the resources to cover it anymore. And that's part of the decline of the business model. Certainly, if we're talking about not so much replacement but a sort of filling of gaps, if you like, where profesional journalism and mainstream media organisations have retreated. Certainly you can talk about citizen journalists, and people who don't even think about themselves as citizen journalists, just ordinary people using social media are filling that gap there. Often times, in the really big stories, the first person on the scene isn't a professional journalist it's someone with smartphone and a Twitter account. And we find, often, the first news we get in those big events is actually from ordinary people; ordinary people using those tools of self publishing, sharing, collaboration that we talked about earlier.
Jay Rosen described authority for journalists coming from "I'm there, you're not, let me tell you about it", and in an age now where we have a really networked audience that is more commonly 'there' than the journalist is, how would a journalist maintain their authority in a situation where they aren't there and they audience is?
A lot of the authority has come from the institutions they work for, in some way. And the fact that they work for a guy who had a printing press or controlled the apparatus of a broadcasting network. And that's the kind of level you needed to play on in order to publish news in the pre-internet era; in the era of information scarcity we might call that. And a lot of journalist's authority came from, and a lot of the license they got, came from that position and came from the role we accorded to the media and journalism and media organisations at that time. Which was an important role, which was about bringing events to us; acting as our proxy; acting as our eyes and ears. We can kind of do that for each other now and you don't need a printing press or a broadcasting operation to actually publish news. But there is no guarantee that anyone's gonna read or listen to or watch what you publish. But that sort of capital investment is no longer necessary. So the role of those institutions has kind of changed and, you know, I teach journalists, I know there are a lot of specialist skills involved in being a journalist, but on the other hand, what we have seen in the internet era is that people have looked at say writing op-eds pieces and publishing them and have discovered that they can kind of do that themselves. So some of the occupational mystique, or prestige of journalism has been stripped away. I think Terry [co-author of YouDecide] describe it as people calling into the uniqueness of journalism as a profession. So definitely that's a couple of things that have happened. There's a big dynamic there where that's kind of shifted. And we can see that manifested on Twitter: people calling out journalists for allegedly writing biased stories or whatever. A lot of that mystique, a lot of that privilege has kinda disappeared, there's no doubt about that.
So what role do you see the mainstream media, and the mainstream news organisations playing as peer to peer reporting becomes more prominent?
I think they've still got big platforms. I mean, the Sydney Morning Herald's website or NineMSN, these are still among the most visited sites in the country. They still get big audiences, they still draw people in. Those habits kind of get entrenched. They're still going to come up really high on Google searches for Australian news topics, there's still a big gravitational pull for those big news services. So they're still the platform upon which stories are made visible. And they're still capable of relaying stuff to a wider audience. If you're talking about doing something a bit more consciously about citizen journalism, and I suppose with the YouDecide project we were consciously trying to build a citizen journalism platform to cover that election, in that case if you're trying to build that purpose built one, or even if you're just aggregating Twitter feeds and publishing that, anyone can do that with things like Storify or whatever now. They can do the kind of thing that we quite laboriously did in 2007. That curatorial judgement; that editorial judgement; publishing decisions, which are quite important in Australia. We've seen someone else get threatened with legal action because of a tweet over the last day or so. All of that stuff, the skills, the judgment and experience and knowledge base of professional journalists is still relevant. It's a different kind of role, it's not that kind of Woodward and Bernstein heroic model of journalism, it's much more attuned to serving a particular community of content creation. It's a curatorial role rather than a kind of heroic, somewhat macho, breaking the story, type role. Does that make sense?
Yeah, in fact we were looking at the idea of curation as a form of authorship. It was something that definitely interested us because we were imagining that in this environment, as news organisations have less resources they're going to be looking towards citizen reporting a lot more and I know that Jess Hill, for example from The Global Mail, did a lot of that during the Arab Spring where she did a lot of that. Where she was engaging on social media, bringing that in and curating content.
There is no magic bullet to sustainability and sustainable business models and all that sort of stuff. But presuming that someone does find a way to make that sort of sustainable, there's kind of a full time job in there for someone. In terms of curating all the best Twitter feeds and social media and blogs about the Middle East and presenting the best of that. In a situation where things are moving rapidly knowing who to follow, knowing who's got the good oil, knowing who's in the right place, keeping on top of that and bringing it to your audience. There's nothing wrong with that. People have this idea that necessarily journalism involves creating original content. But actually a lot of the time, even before the internet, journalists were getting fed stuff whether by PR people or sources or whatever and they were assembling it. And it's very similar, from a certain point of view. I don't know if it equates to authorship per se but certainly if you're putting stuff into it, kinda writing that up, if you're writing links between Tweets and all that sort of stuff. How is that different from writing a story with quotes in it? Except that it's going to be faster.
And cheaper, obviously.
And that's the thing. I mean, there are a whole lot of questions here around intelectual property and moral rights and all that stuff. We could have a longer conversation about that. It's certainly true that it's a way of doing journalism. I think there is less and less argument about that. It seemed like a radical proposition in 2007, but effectively most mainstream media organisations are doing that already.
I wanted to kind of wanted to get to where we are at the moment. Especially in regards to trust with journalists in Australia and might be driving the diminishing trust in Australian journalism. Because if Finkelstein gave us nothing else, it quantified that there was a real problem of trust in the Australian media...
Which they have conveniently put to one side, that whole story, haven't they? But anyway, so too interrupt.
why do you think there is a lack of trust in journalism in Australia?
It's a complicated question, isn't it? Because there's lots of different factors I think. I think rightly or wrongly, people see certain media outlets, depending on their own political position, as serving political agendas rather than the public interest. That's a big thing. I think that people see journalists as too often crowd the political stage rather than reporting on it. I think they sometimes see them as less accountable than they could be. Especially when the media kind of reports on ordinary people. And I think people feel like they're not getting the full story and as much as they mistrust politicians they don't really trust the media to hold them to account. And I'm not making any of that up, I think that's reflected in all kinds of polling that has been done about the media and it's role. And things like the phone hacking in the UK, although the reflex disclaimer that there's no suggestion that it's happened here, but people don't necessarily see the distinction between News Corporation's operations over there and what they do here. I think the mistrust there is probably healthy, in many ways, that people are critical and sceptical about what they are told. Part of it though, and maybe the important part in respect to your discussion is that time and again in the last decade or so, since blogging and self publishing has really taken off, what you've found is that ordinary people have shown the media up. Time and again people have shown that the media is saying things that are inaccurate or dubious or flat out distortions. Blogging and the activities of normal people online have contributed to that mistrust.
We have seen a very antagonistic relationship between journalists and bloggers in the past few years. What's contributed to the antagonism between professional journalists and bloggers?
Teaching journalists and interacting with them, they're all feeling a bit defensive at the moment. For a lot of reasons. As much as I agree with a lot of the criticisms, there is an opposite case to be put which is that a lot of the time people see bias where there isn't necessarily any. Certainly not from individual reporters. Actually, the job of the media is to hold the government to account and you know, if your "team" happens to be in power at the time, sometimes it's going to look like they're being persecuted but a lot of the time the story's legitimate. So they feel defensive about that, they know that they are being criticised in public and it's in their face in this era of social media where they've all lined up to join Twitter and the like because it helps with their own branding and profile. The other thing is that it's not necessarily a happy time to be a journalist, and to have people criticising you on top of that can be quite frustrating. It is an era where people are losing their jobs and there aren't as many jobs around, where newspaper are being shutdown, although not as much here as in the United States. BUT, and maybe less nobly, they don't like having their patch intruded on. And they are conscious too; journalists are conscious of that sort of diminishment of privilege and prestige maybe that's happened. The other thing is, here in Australia, that a lot of that stuff that you're see coming from The Australian and News Limited who have consciously pursued a very, and I think The Australian in particular (people from inside The Australian have admitted as much. They will say they think the editors pursued a publishing strategy that is about getting into fights and causing conflict and being in the middle of it and therefore being at the centre of conversations). The Australians is the paper that has probably pursue bloggers the most. And they just like getting into a fight, and at one time they probably thought it was all trendy nonsense and they kind of just hop in. This has been global too, this sense of conflict between bloggers and journalists. And really it's about people's patches and their perceived priority in carrying out particular activities and leading particular conversations and and informing public opinion. And they don't like being challenged, who does? The same thing is probably going to happen to universities pretty soon and I'm not going to like that either.
And it's not a great time to head into journalism either...
It depends on what you want to do, I don't think it's necessarily a bad time. I don;t think public broadcasting is going to go anywhere soon. It might be funded less, but we'll see, that's always a danger. I mean there are certain kinds of journalism or certain areas of journalism that it makes a lot of sense and if you wanted to be entrepreneurial about it there are probably a lot of opportunities out there at the moment. To some extent big media is still trying to work out what it wants to do about all this 10 years too late.
On the bloggers side they're upset, dissatisfied a lot of the time with the performance of the mainstream media They're angry and they probably get a rise a lot of the time and that probably just encourages them.
We think that with Open Journalism, The Guardian have been the organisation that has really been championing this idea of engaging with their community. Alan Rusbridger, their editor, says "for a newspaper to take this 20th century view that we are going to generate it all here, that we don't need to link to anybody else, we're going to build walls around our content is not a good approach to journalism and by being more open, more participative, more networked is likely to give you a better approximation of the truth which is the reason we are in journalism." The question that raised in my mind is if they are going to link 'out' more, does that diminish their own value? Can an organisation that is openly acknowledging that most of the information isn't coming from them maintain their authority and, be profitable as well I suppose, in this kind of environment?
Profitability is a vexed question, you know? But certainly, let's assume that some element of profitability comes from audience. Let's assume you want to maintain your audience. I think it's perfectly possible for, as The Guardian has shown, by putting yourself at the centre of a conversation and by linking out to the best material you become more authoritative, not less. You become people's first port of call when there's something big happening. You become trusted, not only as a provider of information but as the people who are admitting that we can't provide it all but we know enough to point you in the direction of what other people are saying. It's the only logical response, in many ways, to what is happening. And I think The Guardian are the best example. And they haven't necessarily, I haven't looked at their numbers for a while, I'm pretty sure that the web operations aren't exactly in the black yet, I think the most lucrative thing they do at the moment is their Kindle edition or service. That came up at a conference the other day, that I wasn't at but I was following the Twitter feed. But they do have an audience. And some of the signature moments with them have been throwing open all those leaked documents, the UK MP expenses documents they got and saying to the audience, help us analyse this. And getting stories out of it this way. Whenever there's a big story they're really apt to use Tweets form other journalists and other organisations or link to what other stories people are doing. If you put yourself at the centre of a broader story or broader conversation like that, you're giving readers every incentive to come and get you. Then the only think you've got to do is make the online advertisers pay you enough for the online ads to reach those audience eyeballs to make it all sustainable.