The Commons of the Tragedy
Dan Gillmor, unplugged, in his new post-Mercury blog
(you have added Dan's new feed
to your aggregator, right?), contributed this:
Tsunami and Citizen Journalism's First Draft
I was getting ready to write a long piece about the South Asia catastrophe's
effect on citizen journalism, when the Poynter Institute's Steve Outing called
to discuss it for a piece he was writing. He quoted me at length in his piece,
and captured the important points. I called the tsunami horror a turning point,
because it brought the grassroots front and center in an even more powerful
way than occurred on and after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Read Steve's piece here.
We used to call mainstream journalism the "first draft of history."
Now, I'd argue, much of that first draft is being written by citizen journalists.
And what they're telling us is powerful indeed.
Steve Outing's excellent article
reminds us that progress is uneven, marked by inflection points:
...the tsunamis changed the media landscape. They thrust into the limelight
an army of accidental journalists. Perhaps as a result, now is the time when
citizen reporters will begin to join the ranks of journalism's working class
in informing the public -- not as professional equals, yet in some ways as
important in the grand scheme of news.
Good-enough means of news production are now in the hands of the people. The
well-heeled Phuket tourists possessed all the technical means needed to hook
up a small feeding tube to the media beast. The difficult thing for the media
beast to accept is that this new source of scoops is more than just a broad
distribution of media tech. An amazing number of people are thoughtful, effective
writers, just as skilled as the stringers whom the beast might be able to find,
or field, on short notice. The distressing fact is that good-enough reporting
means and skills are more broadly distributed than are Big-J journalists.
Middle Aware
Middleware is the general description for all the (mostly) invisible software
workhorses that make our e-conomy and our e-culture possible, connecting data
and infrastructure to our user experience of reality. Dan Gillmor's point
deserves to be embraced and extended: not only is much of the first draft of
history being powerfully written by citizen journalists, so are most of the
subsequent, middle, generations. This middle phase defining of history, just
after the first draft, is the most interesting to me. As the old saying goes,
"As the twig is bent, so the branch is inclined."
Let's call it recursive journalism: the amazing detail
and clarity possible when the blogosphere gets on a story and combine our individually
flawed viewpoints into a coherent and relevant representation. Once we put something
useful on the record, the recursion cannot be ignored, no matter how the pros
wish the amateurs would leave history alone. The last time we figured out how
to do this, we called it the scientific revolution.
Here's how Arianna Huffington described
the vitality of recursive journalism last April:
I remember being on a panel around the time of the Lott affair organized
by the Hollywood Radio and Television Society. It was filled with a number
of familiar talking heads, including Larry King and Sam Donaldson. We were
discussing the good, the bad, and the ugly of mainstream journalism. At one
point I launched into a rant about all the stories that I felt were important
but were not getting covered by the big media outlets.
My fellow panelists, on cue, leapt to the defense of their mainstream
brethren, pointing out that many of the stories I mentioned had, in fact,
been covered on TV or by the big daily papers.
And indeed they had. Sometimes in 90-second news packages and sometimes
even on the front page of The New York Times — above the fold.
But that, until the rise of the bloggers, was that. Issue noted. Let's
all move on. Reporters for the big media outlets are obsessed with novelty,
always moving all-too-quickly on to the next big score or the next hot get.
That's when it dawned on me: The problem isn't that the stories I care
about aren't being covered; it's that they aren't being covered in the obsessive
way that breaks through the din of our 500-channel universe. Because those
500 channels don't mean we get 500 times the examination and investigation
of worthy news stories. It means we get the same narrow conventional-wisdom
wrap-ups repeated 500 times. As in “Dean is angry.”
When bloggers decide that something matters, they chomp down hard and
refuse to let go. They're the true pit bulls of reporting. The only way to
get them off a story is to cut off their heads (and even then you'll need
to pry their jaws open). They almost all work alone, but, ironically, it's
their collective effort that makes them so effective. They share their work
freely, feed off one another's work, argue with each other, and add to the
story dialectically.
And because blogs are ongoing and daily, indeed sometimes hourly, bloggers
will often start with a small story, or a piece of one — a contradictory
quote, an unearthed document, a detail that doesn't add up — that the
big outlets would deem too minor. But it's only minor until, well, it's not.
Big media can't see the forest for the trees. Until it's assembled for them
by the bloggers.
It's amazing that the physical "hard news" is 24 hours away from
being fish wrap and that a gazillion little bits of magnetism are able to present
and maintain for us evidence of our perceptions, seemingly permanent, our history
unfolding, never to disappear from due consideration as we write the 2nd through
n drafts of history.
It's even possible that there's life after history's middle drafts for we citizen-scribes.
Will the definitive last draft of history
– perpetually updated – be our responsibility as well?
7:00:32 PM 
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