Public Please

The distinction between citizen journalism and professional journalism is historical, but not conceptual. It is possible to have professional citizen journalists and unprofessional corporate journalists.

By “professional”, I do NOT mean the business of reporting; I mean the manner of reporting. What distinguishes the professional journalist from the amateur journalist is not the time or effort employed, or whether they work full-time or part-time, or whether they work for Fox News or Indymedia; what defines the professional versus the amateur journalist are the specific tasks employed to produce their reports, and the way these tasks observe certain epistemic values, such as biases for documentation, justification, contextualization, verification, summarization, and publication.

The amateur may understand, share, and intend to observe these epistemic values, but lack the skill or technique to report in general accordance with them. A journalist could still report as an amateur even if they possess the skill and technique since they could refrain from using that skill and technique. For example, a person may generally work in a highly professional manner by putting together all the pieces of a story in a critical fashion, but fail to do this on occasion, and so, on those occasions engage in amateur journalism. Therefore, the status of professional or amateur journalist is not permanent, but can change based on how one reports. If someone typically adheres to professional standards, then they are typically called professional journalists, but this status is provisional and scalar.

The business of reporting helps distinguish citizen journalism from corporate journalism. Citizen journalists report as free agents; they are not mouthpieces for any corporation - private, nonprofit, or municipal. While they can engage in business, they resist the corporate mentality, which pretends that an organization is a person. For example, citizen journalists do not brand their voice with the impersonal corporate voice. They brand their voices with themselves and others as individual persons. Citizen journalists do not have bosses that can censor their work. They can publish what they want when they want to whom they want, without the editorial control of any corporation. Citizen journalists do not have corporate clients or individual customers. To the extent that citizen journalists seek fame or fortune, they derive it from the direct contributions of the public.

As I write in the comments of Leonard Witt’s article, The Panacea: Citizen and Pro Journalists as Robots, “We don’t have as many professional citizen journalists as corporate journalists yet, but that is kind of our design objective. How do we help professionalize citizen journalists without turning them into corporate journalists?” We need to design a platform to facilitate the business of citizen journalists, a platform that discourages corporate branding, encourages personal branding, and enables direct contributions from the public to citizen journalists.

Leonard asked me, “what would make a citizen professional journalist better or different from a corporate pro?” While we already know that the manner of reporting distinguishes professional journalists from amateur journalists, and that the primary distinction between the citizen journalist and the corporate journalist is the resistance to anonymity versus the resistance to personality, we need to think carefully about how we pay attention to these two directions of journalism. Both kinds of journalists can in theory adhere to the epistemic values of the profession, but there is a historical tendency for many corporate journalists to ignore, censor, and manipulate public opinion, especially as it relates to social and economic reforms that interfere with the maximization of corporate profits. Citizen journalism, with its fierce independence, is well suited to report on public opinion, especially when it disagrees with corporate attempts to maximize private profits.