TheWayoftheWeb

I was going to make two points regarding the discussion of Citizen Journalism in the wake of the fake article posted on CNN’s iReport ‘Unedited. Unfiltered. News.’ The article falsely claimed Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack, and had a big effect on Apple share prices.

Tim Windsor beat me to one of my points, pointing out that the blame for this should lay more with CNN than citizen journalism in general. Many people seem to have ignored the fact that one bad article on one implementation of Citizen Journalism, does not mean the concept as a whole is flawed – even on the CNN site there’s going to be a good ratio of interesting, factual stories to the fake ones, let alone taking every instance of Citizen Journalism across the internet. After all, how many newspapers have ended up in court because of errors or false articles and images? Did that end print journalism?

My second point is around fact checking and reprinting and responding to articles. Increasingly we all get our news from a huge variety of sources, both mainstream and individual-generated. This means that as receivers, we need to be more proactive in judging all our inputs. Particulary if, as bloggers and content producers ourselves, we intend to republish and share that information. In a world where everyone is a potential news source for their friends and contacts, it’s damaging to our own individual reputations to spread something which is old and out-of-date, irrelevant to our contacts/friends/audience, or simply false.

It’ll take time, and better tools, but increasingly people will be looking for more ways to verify information. When I see breaking news on Twitter or Facebook etc I check it against mainstream news via Google News etc. When I read mainstream or non-mainstream websites and blogs, or microblogging etc, I measure it against what I know about the sorurce, whether it’s a friend who might have discovered exclusive news, or an organisation I know has generally been reliable. And that’s just basic fact checking.

After all, Reader Reception Theory has been around since the 1960s, meaning that the understanding of a text is shaped by the interpretation of a reader based on their own experiences and culture. Journalists have always been trained and told to question everything and check all the facts. And there have been enough cases where rumours and fictitious articles have been well publicised.

On the plus side, the debate around Citizen Journalism has not only reminded me of a planned blog post which never saw the light of day, but also helped further ideas for a couple of applications I’ve been thinking about. And Steve Jobs is OK, which is good!