The Citizen Journalist's Moment Arrives

Credit the recession for accomplishing what all the web 2.0 evangelists out there couldn't quite: getting Big Media to take seriously the promise -- however dubious it may prove -- of large-scale citizen journalism.

In the past week, Hearst Newspapers, The New York Times Co. and the Washington Times have all announced plans to harvest the reporting of non-professional volunteers. Hearst is partnering with Helium, an online freelance-writers' network; the New York Times is launching a string of local news sites with contributions from area residents; and the Washington Times will tap members of the military to cover the bases where they live.

There's a healthy dose of irony here, especially when it comes to Hearst, which also said last week that it plans to start charging for much of the content on its newspapers' websites. In essence, Hearst is saying to readers: Please start paying us for our content, and, while you're at it, please supply the content.

The timing of the two developments is no coincidence, of course. Media companies are taking a hard look at the citizen-journalism model as it becomes clear that the professional-journalism model is no longer tenable, at least not at the scale they've been supporting it. As Simon Dumenco puts it, "[D]espite the highfalutin civic-mindedness implicit in the term 'citizen journalism,' the truth is that a lot of big media organizations seem to regard the phenomenon as, mostly, a way to get more content for free or on the cheap."

But will they get what they pay for? Citizen reporting is one area where the cable networks have been leading the innovation charge, and the results haven't always been pretty. Most notoriously, it was CNN's iReport that sparked a brief sell-off of Apple shares after a user erroneously reported that Steve Jobs had died. It's bad enough for that kind of news to carry the imprimatur of CNN; what happens when it's branded The New York Times?

Even when it's not outright fallacious, the quality of amateur journalism is often pretty low. The Wall Street Journal reports today that SB Nation, a blog network that "recruits...authors and pays them based in part on the popularity of their posts," is one of a small number of niche web publishers growing despite the recession, thanks largely to how little it pays its writers. During football season, I'm an occasional follower of SB Nations Green Bay Packers blog, Acme Packing Co. It's hard to imagine a professional sportswriter regularly posting game-day wrap-ups in which he admitted to not having watched the game.