Citizen Journalism – What A Perfect Way Top Spread A Rumor!

Philip Stone October 6, 2008

Remember a few years back when citizen journalism started coming into its own and how it was damned for its amateurism and there was little or no way of checking out what those citizen journalists wrote or videoed. But then they started filing from breaking news events where the professionals just plain didn’t have people on the ground, and it wasn’t long before the 24-hour cable news networks and other news outlets begged their viewers across the globe in every newscast to contribute. But as CNN learned last week the original fear is still very much with us.

CNN has gone into citizen journalism in a big way with its I-Reports service; indeed it likes it so much it even runs a weekend show on CNN International made up purely of contributions by its viewers around the world. But it only takes one bad apple to upset the cart as CNN learned last week when a false text report on the I-Reports web site that Apple’s Steve Jobs had been taken ill caused mayhem to Apple’s shares – about $1 billion wiped out within the 10 minutes it took Apple to tell the world the report was not true.

CNN makes very clear that its I-Reports site is not CNN-edited, only those items that make it to the main CNN news site are checked; indeed the site is separate from CNN’s professional output, but accessible on CNN.com. But the problem is that such nuances get easily lost. Read all the reports about how the false Apple report made it out beyond I-Reports to other blogs and other news sites and in practically every such story there named is the brand “CNN”.

The fact is I-Reports is owned and run by CNN, and for all the liability clauses the lawyers have thrown in to distance it from the “real” CNN, the fact is there are so many people out there reading it who blurt, “CNN says…” And no matter how much CNN tells the world it was an amateur “citizen journalist” false report that appeared on a CNN section other than its main news site, the sorry fact is that the brand still gets nailed.

And of course, people will always remember the mistakes, and not all the times a news organization is right.

Now a lot of people apparently lost a lot of money by selling on the rumor of Jobs’ illness, and the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the sordid affair.  But the incident points out yet again how important it is for investors to know and trust their news source. Should one really be selling shares based on an I-Reports alert?

Rumor mongering is one of the main scourges professional news agencies must  each day for it only takes a few minutes for a falsehood to be out there, especially if from a reputable organization, for the financial damage to be done. The news agencies have strict policies on checking up information that comes to them via a third party – if it is a fax with a company letterhead with market information, don’t trust it; phone the company to check if it is real. If it’s a phone call from the company PR department with an announcement, don’t trust it; phone the company back. Check, check, check!

But, of course, none of that happens with citizen journalism sites. Items get filed, they sit there, and they don’t get fact checked. You really take your chances if you make take financial action based on such reports from a source you don’t know or trust.

And yes, there are times when citizen journalists are first with the real news. Remember the horrific Chinese earthquake this year – the first reports were via Twitter from people caught in the middle of the earth moving beneath their feet. But the “real” news organizations used those reports as “tips” and checked them out before filing their first bulletins.

For news organizations, citizen journalism has been a great boon. Again, take CNN. In its infinite wisdom it decided last year as an economy move to fund further staffing by dumping Reuters, one of the world’s two great global international news, still pictures and video agencies. One had only to watch CNN International to see how often it had relied on the Reuters video, particularly for breaking news. Now AP Television News is good, but it can’t be everywhere so there are now more holes in CNN’s text and video global  coverage – it took care of the text by accessing  material off the public Reuters web site, and that didn’t cost anything,  but video was another matter.

So time and time again CNN International anchors on breaking news stories are literally begging their viewers in those regions to send in their I-Reports video because CNN had no one there on the ground, and neither apparently did AP. And, what’s more, the I-Reports video, if they can get it, is free, yes free. You can’t get a better deal than that! It used to be at the beginning that the technical snobs  complained about amateur video quality, but it soon became accepted that something, even if not technically great, was better than nothing at all.

And so it has come to pass that citizen journalists have become an important, and free, source of text, video, and still pictures to the international  news organizations.

And most of the time it works pretty well.

But last week’s CNN experience – oops, we should say last week’s I-Reports experience, a service that CNN doesn’t professionally edit – shows that a brand’s name can get plastered by association.

Depending on how much one values one’s brand, maybe just maybe, it would be the smart news organization that gets so much from free text, stills, and video to actually dedicate some staff to ensure their name doesn’t get blackened by the rumor mongers, by those who might alter stills and video, and those who want to use a site associated with a trusted news source to send out false information.

Sure it costs some of money that’s not in the budget, but instead of relying just on the lawyers’ liability clauses isn’t really worth a bit more human effort and cost to protect the brand?  

Laissez-faire doesn’t work in professional journalism!