After a semester of talking about possibilities and probabilities, we finally got our answer with the shootings at Virginia Tech: citizen journalism is going to play a huge role in media’s future. It was easy to debate things before there was a really large news event to put our theories to the test, but I’d say now the evidence is undeniable.
As soon as I learned about the shootings taking place, I flipped on the TV and started browsing the Internet to see what I could find out. The style of reporting wasn’t a complete shock to me, but the scale on which they were using it
On TV, reporters had not quite reached the scene, but news anchors on all of the national 24-hour news networks were reporting on calls parents and students at the university made to them. They read stories from blogs and showed photos that were posted almost instantaneously. Their entire reports relied on reporting citizens were providing them with.
The Internet was even more detailed. The information was posted in story form, but the stories the Web sites posted linked to cell phone videos, pictures students with digital cameras took and stories students in the barricaded classrooms were posting to blogs. The complete reliance on citizens for the news drove home the point that we’re no longer working in a traditional media setting.
As much as some of us may dislike the idea that citizens can and will report on many large news stories, it’s no longer a choice we have nor something we can control. The ease with which you can post news to Blogger, photos to a site like Flickr and video to YouTube removed the barriers to citizens wanting to instantly share news. What our discussion should focus on now is not the “if the media is going to evolve” debate but how we are going to adapt with it.
By using these citizen reports, photos and video as a strong supplement to what we do, we can once again strengthen our position as a provider of information and more importantly, build more credibility with the people we are continuously covering. Denying the usefulness citizens have in reporting news is ignorance at best and ridiculous arrogance at worst. Providing a place for all of these forms of communication and information to culminate, newspapers (both print and more specifically online) can once again establish themselves as the top news source in media.
Large-scale news events like this, though horribly unfortunate and sad, will occur many times in the future. We should use this tragic event as the basis of how coverage should work in the new media world. By studying the coverage that was provided, we can learn how we can improve on what we did and how to fix flaws in our system. By providing complete coverage of events like this, we can start to regain some of the readership we’ve lost over past years.
This also applies to smaller events and news stories. By providing thorough coverage of them and giving citizen journalists the ability to contribute to the newsgathering and reporting processes, we stand to gain tremendously from a huge influx of stories, ideas and opinions that we’ve been lacking in recent years.
The concept of citizen journalism has been lauded as the future of our profession by certain professors during my schooling over the past few years, but I think the shootings at Virginia Tech drove the point home as a reality. If we’re smart, we’ll use this as evidence that we need to seriously consider making some changes in the newsroom and adapt to the future mediascape. If not, we’ll just continue to fall farther behind.
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