Thursday Bram on Citizen Journalism

This interview is part of the Future of Journalism interview series.

Interview with Thursday Bram , blogger and former journalist.


With the rise of vehicles like Wikipedia and its sister projects, such as Wikinews, that are run with the help of volunteers throughout the world, do you think citizen journalism will run primarily on this model? Secondly, is there a difference in the quality of work between paid freelancers and citizen journalists who do the work for free?

While I think that the Wikinews model works wonderfully on a global level, it's less than ideal on a local level. It's easy to get a citizen journalist to cover a big story that affects hundreds of thousands, but it's rare for an unpaid journalist to do an expose on the local hospital. Even if you can find such a person, there's an obvious difference in how a citizen journalist might cover a local story and how a paid freelancer would tackle it. Especially key is the fact that a professional is more strenous in fact-checking — many citizen journalists have minimal understanding of libel. Furthermore, a paid freelancer typically has more time to spend on a story  — she doesn't need to work around her day job to interview sources.


As more information sharing happens on the web, how can an individual discriminate between information sources? In other words, what makes a website authoritative? How can people   be certain that a piece of content has been fact checked?

Trusting websites is a difficult issue, but there are a few ways in which a site can make itself an authoritative source: first is the quality of its sources. A website that doesn't cite sources — even links back to other sites — is less likely to be factually accurate. Interviews with experts, discussions of books and other sources and links to other websites can help prove a site trustworthy. Another way to judge a site is on the quality and quantity of links that it receives: if other people trust a site's accuracy, they are more likely to link to it.


As a former journalist, what do you feel is the major difference between writing for a newspaper vs. a website?

There is a major stylistic difference between writing for print and web: length is the most obvious example. Articles written for the web can be quite short — despite the fact that there is more room for a lengthy article online than in print, many readers find it harder to read long articles online.


In your opinion, what is the future of journalism?

Despite claims to the contrary, print journalism is not dead. However, it is changing: rather than trying to provide up to the minute coverage (which the web can do better), print journalism's future success lies in analysis — explaining the day's news, rather than reporting it. Online journalism's future is to become further divided into niches: websites can easily focus on just a small section of news, and target readers who care only about one topic. Because of that fact, online journalists are much more likely to write for multiple sites. They can cover one topic from multiple angles for a variety of niche websites. Online journalism makes freelancing a far more practical matter, because so many websites need content.

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