Citizen Journalism

The phrase “citizen journalism” entered the journalistic lexicon in the immediate aftermath of the South Asian tsunami of December 2004. The remarkable range of first-person accounts, camcorder video footage, mobile and digital camera snapshots generated by ordinary citizens on the scene (often people on vacation)—many posted through blogs and personal webpages—was widely heralded for making a unique contribution to mainstream journalism's coverage. One newspaper headline after the next declared citizen journalism to be yet another startling upheaval, if not outright revolution, being ushered in by Internet technology. News organizations, it was readily conceded, were in the awkward position of being dependent on this “amateur” material in order to tell the story of what was transpiring on the ground.

Despite its ambiguities, the term citizen journalism appeared to capture something of the countervailing ethos of the ordinary person's capacity to bear witness. In the years since the South Asian tsunami, the term has secured its place in journalism's vocabulary, more often than not associated with a particular crisis event. It is described variously as “grassroots journalism,” “open source journalism,” “participatory journalism,” “hyperlocal journalism,” “distributed journalism,” or “networked journalism” (as well as “user-generated content”), but there is little doubt that it is profoundly recasting crisis reporting's priorities and protocols.

In tracing its emergent ecology, it is important to recognize the ways in which its diverse modes of reportorial form, practice, and epistemology—typically defined too narrowly around technological “revolutions”—have been crafted through the needs of crisis reporting. In the months following the tsunami, two such crises appeared to consolidate its imperatives, pretty well dispensing with claims that it was a passing “fad” or “gimmick.” The London bombings of July 2005, like Hurricane Katrina's devastation that August, necessarily figure in any assessment of how citizen journalism has rewritten certain long-standing reportorial principles.

Particularly vexing for any journalist during a crisis is the difficulty of securing access to the scene. In London, tight security barred entry to Underground (subway) stations, which meant that the aftermath of the explosions was beyond reach and out of sight. On the other side of the emergency services' cordons, however, were ordinary Londoners, some with cell phone cameras. These tiny lenses captured the scene underground, with many of the images conveying what some aptly described as an eerie, even claustrophobic quality.

Video clips taken were judged all the more compelling because they were dim, grainy, and shaky, and—even more important—because they were documenting an angle on an event as it was actually happening. The pictures captured the horror of being trapped underground. Many of these photographs, some breathtaking in their poignancy, were viewed thousands of times within hours of their posting on sites such as http://Flickr.com or http://Moblog.co.uk.

It was precisely this quality that journalists and editors were looking for when quickly sifting through the vast array of images e-mailed to them. The director of BBC News recorded that within minutes of the first blast, they had received images from the public, 50 within an hour. The London [Page 98]Evening Standard production editor Richard Oliver opined that news organizations were bound to tap into this resource more and more in future.

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