WASHINGTON – If you are reading this blog, then, chances are, it’s already too late.
You’ve already made the life choice to become a journalist or journalism connoisseur, meaning (a) you’re either the brunt of a good chunk of the world’s career-minded jokes these days, or (b) you’re a rare holdout from the hard-news generation who still appreciates the tireless pursuit of justice through the publication of truth.
Let’s face it: Journalism’s a rough business. In fact, it’s unapologetically brutal. It demands that you give all of yourself – be it in time, energy or personal relationships– in the pursuit of telling truths that the public may, in all honesty, never want to hear.
It’s a cost we know and, eventually, may even come to love, the emotional sadists that we are.
But in today’s age of international springs of rebellion and wars so prevalent that they seemingly blend into one another, the cost has evolved and journalists’ lives have accidentally become a currency in a negotiation over which they have no control.
I’ve seen this year’s rededication of the Newseum’s Journalists Memorial in Washington, and watched an HBO special depicting photos taken while combat photographer Tim Hetherington was dying, feeling almost haunted by his ghost. And I’ve visited FreeJamesFoley.org semi-religiously in the hope that some miraculous page update would speak of his return.
All the while, my gut urged me to ask a question that I hadn’t heard others confront: why?
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 31 press workers have been killed so far in 2013, with 20 of those deaths having had a confirmed work-related motive.
Why send journalists to conflict areas when technology and new media enable citizen journalists to document the same events and issues?
Should citizen journalism replace embedded reporting completely?
Despite my high hopes for the blogosphere to reduce the human cost of telling these stories, the experts I spoke with responded with a resounding “no.”
Jigar Mehta, the brains behind the “18 Days in Egypt” interactive documentary, says the best conflict-area coverage comes from a combination of professional and citizen journalism.
“The two work in harmony, or we’re getting to a point where they’re starting to complement each other,” Mehta said in a phone interview.
According to Mehta, the professional journalist’s advantage lies in their knowledge of context, attention to detail, sourcing capabilities and an analytical eye.
“They can bring a wealth of knowledge about the situation and nuance,” he said. “They can understand the political situation. They might have sources throughout, you know, various governments, and are being able to pull together and connect the dots in a way that a citizen reporter might not be able to.”
Loren Ghiglione, a global journalism professor at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, agreed. In a phone interview, he added that the trained journalist’s contextual understanding of combatant history enables them to “ask better questions” than even the most informed citizen.
On the other hand, Mehta said, citizen journalists serve as local experts with an innate familiarity with the areas being reported on.
“If you grow up and you’re from this place, you have this knowledge that is really kind of embedded in you and I think that just brings a different aspect to it,” he said.
He also cited quantity as a huge advantage of citizen journalists, since their mass availability allows them to cover smaller events, like protests or riots, to ensure that they’re “documented and preserved.”
Ghiglione agreed.
“The more people reporting on an incident, especially when access is difficult, the better,” he said.
Despite describing citizen journalists as being more documentarians than reporters, though, Mehta said informal training and exposure to journalistic ethics and case studies of real-world issues faced by journalists in the field can allow them to report objectively.
Zach Wise, professor of digital storytelling at Medill, took it a step further, saying that editorial and journalistic input are still needed to curate citizen reports into cohesive stories and bridge the gap between documenting and reporting.
“Someone needs to add journalism value,’’ Wise said, “by both finding signal in the noise and verifying reports.”
