Let There Be Light!

Citizen journalism.  We have come back around to this topic.  Or have we ever really left it?

Because of the pervasiveness of social media, the citizen journalist has been our bedfellow…our partner in crime…our conjoined twin practically since the beginning of this class.

Grant Wood Studio.  Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1890s).  Remodeled by Grant Wood (1920s).  
National Register of Historic Places (1982-1984).  Photographed by Stephen Milligan 
(July 6, 2013). 

Do y’all remember Gina?  Before she absconded from the class, carrying away her opinions on citizen journalism like a cat burglar in the night, she wrote a blog post for Week 2 entitled “A Case for a Well-Place Period: Citizen.  Journalist.”

Thankfully, Gina exited so rapidly (perhaps more like a smash and grab at a jewelry store than a cat burglar), she didn’t delete her blog, so I was able to look back at it after this week to see how I felt.

This was also the week I had a conversation with Bart at Eye Associates of Cayce, in which I came to a realization.

Now in Week 12, I’m presented with the paper “Can This Marriage Be Saved?  The Love-Hate Relationship between Traditional Media and Citizen Journalism.”

I have to admit I’m still torn on the topic, and while the lightbulb did come on, it’s still in the brightening stage—I’m working on adjusting the dimmer to a comfortable level of understanding and acceptance.

I’m afraid I have no choice—if I don’t get with the program, all of those citizen journalists on social media are going to overload the circuit, and I’m going to be knocked flat by the shock…and find myself with a perm to boot!

Reading the paper helped—in two ways. 

It felt good to have my opinion validated by some of the professional journalists who were interviewed, those who believe in the tradition of journalism as a profession with professional standards of conduct and procedures.

But it also was helpful for me to see other professional journalists who are embracing and working with the citizen journalists to help them be better and provide them guidance concerning professional standards.

This can only be a win-win situation, one that will ultimately benefit the audience: The professional journalists will gain the reach of the citizen journalists in the trenches, while the citizen journalists will profit from the expertise of the professional journalists.

The room just got a little brighter.

The Eyes Have It

Week 2 and another topic has fallen into my lap.  Can I be so lucky for the next fourteen weeks?  Probably not, so let me take advantage of this while I can.

Tuesday I went to Eye Associates of Cayce for my yearly exam.  After the doctor had completed her preliminary examination, she assaulted my eyes with those drops to dilate them and announced that in the meantime, I had to take the test to identify those faint dancing squiggly lines on a screen.  Certainly, the early stages of pupil dilation could only add to the ease of the task.

Detail.  Dillon County Courthouse.  Dillon, South Carolina.  William Augustus Edwards, 
Architect.  1911.  Beaux Arts/Classical Revival/Neoclassical style.  National Register of 
Historic Places (October 30, 1981).  Photographed by Stephen Milligan (April 18, 2014). 

An assistant, Bart, came in to lead me across the hall for this test, and he complimented me on how nice I looked (in my new vest and tie), commenting that so many people these days appear in public in pajama bottoms.  I told him I’d seen kids trying to do that at school.  The inevitable questions followed, and he divulged he had a degree in English (but could never teach).  After a proper amount of time discussing the horrible state of people’s grammar these days, particularly on social media, he began quizzing me on teaching journalism.

As our poor-grammar-on-social-media discussion turned into a journalism discussion, Bart revealed his mistrust of many of the “news” items people post online, and how he always takes the time to check out such postings before he believes them. 

By this time, he had escorted me back to the examination room, where I gestured to the notebook of readings for this class I’d brought with me to kill time in the waiting room.  Or it may have been the doctor’s charts—at this point my vision was getting fuzzier by the minute.  But I could clearly see Bart for who he really was.  A literate consumer of news—right here in South Carolina!  I should have placed him in a jar with holes punched in the lid.

I told him I was currently taking a journalism class, and this exact topic was up for discussion.  News literacy.  Healthy skepticism.  The spread of news on social media.  Verification.

Bart mentioned when he wanted serious news and perspective, he looked to a variety of trustworthy sources—aside from WIS (the local NBC affiliate) and The State (Columbia’s newspaper), both of which so many around here rely on—including the BBC and Al Jazeera.  Indicating my notebook (or that stack of charts) again, I told him about the piece we had to read about the American Time magazine covers as opposed to the international covers, and that launched us into a discussion American news tastes and the perception of Americans by others.

I then admitted to Bart I was a bit skeptical of the citizen journalist concept—and he agreed!  I told him about the idea of Open Journalism we’d just read about in The Elements of Journalism: the professional journalist sourcing eyewitness accounts from social media and combining them with his or her expertly gathered background information to bring the news consumer the best of the old and the new—and a more complete story along with it.  Perhaps this is the best answer…it’s certainly an answer I can grow comfortable with.  Better than just swallowing social media news wholesale, Open Journalism allows news to be filtered through the trained eye of the professional journalist who can use his or her lens to verify and help the reader or viewer make sense of everything.

In the interim, I am looking forward to my next eye exam.  Perhaps one day, Bart and I can frolic at the Cayce-West Columbia Riverwalk, feeding the ducks and reciting the First Amendment in a beautiful montage set against “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash...