Participatory journalism: IndyMedia, OhmyNews and Wikinews

7 Participatory journalism: IndyMedia, OhmyNews and Wikinews

‘Once upon a time, before the Internet revolutionalized public discourse’, Joan Connell (2003) recalls, ‘there was only one sure way for a person to become a pundit: get a job as a journalist and hold forth from the pages of a newspaper, magazine or a broadcast organization’. Thanks to blogs, however, everything has changed. Now, she adds, ‘anyone with something to say and access to the right software can be a publisher, a pundit and observer of events great and small’.

Speaking on the occasion of MSNBC.com’s launch of Weblog Central, Connell makes clear her passionate advocacy of blogging as a medium rich with promise to transform, even democratize, the media landscape. ‘What had once quietly flourished in the grassroots of cyberspace has now burst into the mainstream’, she maintains, ‘changing the way Internet news and com- munities are perceived’. It is in thinking through the implications of this for MSNBC in her role as executive producer of Opinions and Communities that she advances the case for Weblog Central as the user’s ‘gateway to the world of personal news’. Describing the site as a ‘perch’ from which the user can both observe and, crucially, participate in ‘the brave new world of personal news’, she argues that it will provide them with the means to be a pundit too. More specifically, she envisions users making the site their daily destination as they look to interact with specific blogs – such as Altercation (Eric Alterman on politics, media and culture), Cosmic Log (science editor Alan Boyle on science and space exploration), Hardball (Chris Matthews on the art of poli- tics), The Juice (Jan Herman on entertainment news with attitude) and Practical Futurist (Michael Rogers on technology) – as well as to a blog about blogs, namely Will Femia’s Blogspotting, which ‘shines a light on life in the blogosphere’. Moreover, and in keeping with Weblog Central’s commitment to conducting experiments with this new narrative form, Connell issues a call to users themselves to become involved. ‘We’ll count on bloggers and those who know and appreciate online journals’, she states, ‘to help us spot trends, share tips and make connections’.

At first glance, Weblog Central’s rationale for adopting this role of fa- cilitating connections is appealing. Connell credits blogs with democratizing news-gathering and commentary, not least by providing non-journalists with

122 ONLINE NEWS access to the necessary tools and platforms. Attention is similarly drawn to

the value of the blog format as ‘a vehicle for breaking news’, thereby re- affirming their proclaimed status as a form of journalism. She also expresses the conviction that blogs represent ‘the next generation of online commu- nities, making human encounters in cyberspace more coherent and more civil’. These laudable aims, in practice, will entail a number of additional resources, including links to sites offering proprietary and open-source soft- ware so that users can start their own blog, and a continually updated list of blog indices to help users find information along with other like-minded bloggers, among other features. Weblog Central seeks to help users realize the potential of blogs as an emerging form of ‘unmediated personal and public expression’. In so doing, it represents a significant intervention for efforts to take grassroots initiatives into the mainstream with the aim of enriching public dialogue and debate.

Then again, looking at Weblog Central from a different angle, it also represents an attempt to consolidate and extend the corporate hegemony of market-driven journalism. In other words, it is a question of appropriation. At risk of being obscured by laudable proclamations about this brave new world of citizen blogging are the political and economic imperatives shaping its development. In considering Weblog Central’s aims and objectives, it is im- portant to recognize that MSNBC.com is owned and operated as part of the NBC News group, which draws its material from its television counterpart, MSNBC (a 24-hour cable news channel), along with NBC News, the Wa- shington Post newspaper, and Newsweek magazine, among other sources. Weblog Central, it follows, is the online extension of two extraordinarily powerful corporations, namely Microsoft and the General Electric Company (GE). Underpinning this ostensibly grassroots initiative, with its rhetorical appeal to the revolutionary potential of the internet for news reporting, lie the commercial interests of the world’s largest software company in Micro- soft, and those of one of the largest multinational conglomerates in GE. The latter’s interests span financial services, energy supply, manufacturing (in- cluding nuclear weapons systems), transportation, and beyond. Regardless of the relative sincerity of the individuals’ motives behind this initiative, there can be no denying that Weblog Central’s ownership effectively curtails its potential for developing forms of journalism capable of transgressing the limits of its corporate ethos.

Alarm bells have long been sounded about the dangers for independent journalism posed by the growing concentration, conglomeration and globa- lization of news media ownership. Some have aptly likened the control over information exercised by these companies as ‘the new censorship’, especially where the collective interests of public service collide with the private ones of shareholders. News, they warn, is at risk of being transformed into a mere commodity, the value of which is defined by its potential for maximizing

PARTICIPATORY JOURNALISM 123 profits. The ‘bottom-line’ pressures engendered by this process encourage

journalists, in turn, to internalize a company mindset as being consistent with the ideals of professionalism – even where the ensuing news coverage is so often demonstrably superficial, if not misleading, as a result (see also Allan 2004a, 2005). ‘I’m absolutely certain that the journalism industry’s’ modern structure has fostered a dangerous conservatism – from a business sense more than a political sense, though both are apparent – that threatens our future’, argues journalist Dan Gillmor (2004) in his book We the Media. ‘Our resistance to change’, he adds, ‘some of it caused by financial concerns, has wounded the journalism we practice and has made us nearly blind to tomorrow’s rea- lities’ (2004: xv).

In light of these sorts of issues, it is hardly surprising that the language of ‘crisis’ is recurrently being used to describe journalism today – and why so many people look to the less-travelled corners of the web in the hope that genuinely alternative types of non-corporate journalism will emerge, develop and flourish. In the course of this chapter’s discussion, several distinctive initiatives to recast mainstream reporting will be examined, each of them representing ‘bottom-up’ projects intended to reverse the preoccupations of ‘top-down’ traditional media. In the first instance, our attention turns to the Independent Media Center (IMC or IndyMedia for short), a grassroots forum of news reporting about social and political issues. The mission statement posted on its homepage describes it as ‘a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth’, before ex- plaining that it is a collective made up of a diverse range of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists – professional and amateur alike – committed to social change. ‘We work out of a love and inspiration for people who continue to work for a better world’, the statement elaborates, ‘despite corporate media’s distortions and unwillingness to cover the efforts to free humanity’.