Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

I tuned into RTE’s Today With Pat Kenny Show earlier this week for an interesting discussion about citizen journalism. Ger Colleran, editor of the Irish Daily Star, was quick to point out that citizen journalism has always been around in one form or another, but that technology has brought the public closer to the media. This has been particularly brought to the fore by the events in Iran.

Some people seem to miss out on the point of journalism when discussing technology and the news. The fact that something newsworthycan be published instantly on Twitter doesn’t mean that traditional media is on its deathbed. As Ger Colleran pointed out, traditional media’s role has always been to filter citizen journalism and bring newsworthy content to a wider audience. The difficulty for most media organisations is their relative slowness in mining emerging sources of content for news.

The role of the media to filter citizen journalism sounds somewhat parasitic, but in fact it’s quite the opposite. We need organisations or individuals that we can trust. Noam Cohen had an interesting piece in the New York Times about the strengths and weaknesses of Twitter in relation to the events in Iran. In it he points out:

Nothing on Twitter has been verified. While users can learn from experience to trust a certain Twitter account, it is still a matter of trust. And just as Twitter has helped get out first-hand reports from Tehran, it has also spread inaccurate information, perhaps even disinformation. An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so).

As I’ve mentioned before, some people seem to think that because news breaks on a certain medium first, then that medium is inherently the best news source. That is a dangerous assumption as there are editorial standards to consider. Following its coverage of the Beslan tragedy, the BBC introduced a time delay as part of the its editorial guidelines in order to underline the point that accuracy and quality should come before speed.

When traditional media has been shown up of late, it is because the structural flaws of short staffed newsrooms have been highlighted. A hoax quote posted to Wikipedia after the death of Maurice Jarre was used by a number of media organisations. The journalists involved took the easy option and turned to Google. What sets journalists and bloggers apart is that journalists are meant to have the time to research their stories thoroughly.

A lot is being made of the current events in the US Newspaper industry. A recent article in the Observer sums it up, with Philadelphia looking the the first US city to lose all of its print newspapers. Obviously as a result there is a lot of speculation about newspapers in other parts of the globe. However, a key factor that is often overlooked in these comparisons is that a lot of US newspapers were bought and run into the ground by people that didn’t know anything about journalism. The real vicious cycle that emerged was each newspaper in difficulty could never service the level of debt generated by the purchase and the measures take to address costs such as newsroom cutbacks only harmed the quality of the product.

By not having people on the ground, traditional media are fundamentally undermining themselves. David Simon, the creator of The Wire, made a comment that you don’t see many bloggers in a courtroom. Unfortunately, you have to worry how much longer we wil see journalists there either. For example, Jamie Symth had an interesting piece in the Irish Times the other week on the effect of cutbacks on the coverage of EU affairs. In the article Smyth outlines the measures which a number of publications have taken recently. The net result of which is that the public will be less informed about the EU, all in the same year as Smyth points out that will be “punctuated by the European elections, a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and the appointment of new team of commissioners in Brussels.“

In terms of international comparison and the effects of the cutbacks in terms of Irish media output, Smyth goes on to write:

Statistics show Ireland is very poorly represented in Brussels, with just six journalists registered to cover the commission from The Irish Times, Examiner , RTÉ and Irish Daily Mail. In comparison, states with a similar population such as Denmark, Austria and Finland all have 13 or 14 correspondents based in Brussels, while Switzerland, which isn’t even an EU member, has 19 registered reporters and Norway has nine journalists.

Research conducted after the first Lisbon referendum demonstrated that public knowledge of EU affairs is low in Ireland. The commission has also noted a growing euroscepticism among the Irish media, which is being driven by increasing sales of the Irish editions of British tabloid papers.

Given all that is going on in the world at present, it is more important than ever that the public is kept informed on a range of key issues. The appetite for news is there, as recent current affairs viewing figures have demonstrated.

If traditional media is to adapt and thrive in the new media ecosystem, the people in charge need to listen to the likes of Jeff Jarvis more. He hits the nail on the head in a recent blog post:

The greatest value a news organization can add to this new news ecosystem is to identify, curate, vet, and train people…The larger the network of people a news organization can organize, the better shape it will be in when news breaks, the better it can filter the reports that come - whether from people in that network or in the larger network of people those people know. The more people in the network, the more who can go to the scene of news or research closer to it - the more you can ask for help.

As for the future of journalism, I’m inclined to agree with a piece in the Economist that John Naughton recently highlighted:

Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English. The winner of the Iranian protests was neither old media nor new media, but a hybrid of the two.