Power Without Responsibility (JN 500)Online Journalism and Social Media /

Citizen JournalismCase study: WikiLeaks

Lecture Outline

1. The Virtual Public Sphere

2. Online Journalism History

3. Citizen Journalism

4. Online Journalism Issues

5. Twittersphere

6. WikiLeaks

1. The Virtual Public Sphere

We are witnessing “the decline and reconfiguration of the conventional public sphere itself: the slow, casual collapse … of the one-to-many mass media of the industrial age, and their replacement with the many-to-many, user-led media of the networked age whose systematic features necessitate the development of vastly different models for the mediation of political processes (Bruns, 2008: p. 67).

1. The Virtual Public Sphere

Not simple replacement of conventional public sphere and mass media but complex co-existence of mass media and new/social media – Facebook posting of news stories, Twitter feed on TV programmes.

“The hybrid media system is built upon interactions among older and newer media logics” (Chadwick 2013, p. 4).

1. The Virtual Public Sphere

Virtual public sphere challenges hierarchies of knowledge.

Equipotentiality – a “belief that expertise cannot be located beforehand, and thus general and open participation is the rule” (Bauwens, cited in Bruns, 2008: p. 71).

This does not undermine the role of policy experts but increases their accountability to the wider public.

1. The Virtual Public Sphere

More active consumers of news seeking greater diversity of stories from greater diversity of news outlets.

Open source, citizen journalism, Wikipedia – end users have become active co-producers – they have become “produsers” (Bruns, 2008: p. 72).

1. The Virtual Public Sphere

Social media was instrumental in the rise of the ‘Arab Spring’.

Egyptian protesters used a new social media link that marries Google, Twitter and SayNow, a voice-based social media platform, to find out about the most recent protest and political developments.

http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-02-01/news/27738626_1_egyptians-tweet-messages

1. The Virtual Public Sphere

The Net of hatred: after Utoya

http://www.opendemocracy.net/thomas-hylland-eriksen/net-of-hatred-after-utøya

Effect of anonymous posts

Netiquette – avoid flaming

Need for journalists to operate as “democratic traffic-police”.

2. Online Journalism History

Number of online news sites accelerated in late 1990s but halted by dotcom bubble in 1999 (McNair 2009, p. 137).

BBC launched its online news service in 1997.

Early online versions of newspapers have given way to information portals with more interactive features.

1998 Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broken by Drudge Report.

2. Online Journalism History

Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (2003) saw coming of age of online journalism (McNair 2009, p. 140).

‘Salam Pax’ – the Baghdad Blogger.

2. Online Journalism History

September 2002 – first time users of nytimes.com exceeded daily sales of The New York Times (McNair 2009, p. 141).

House of Lords Select Committee on Communication noted in 2008 three subsectors:Websites of established news providers;Online news aggregators; and Individual websites run by bloggers

2. Online Journalism History

In 2008 MailOnline overtook Guardian as UK’s most used newspaper site. Now most visited news site globally.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html

http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/how-bad-is-the-daily-mail-for-you-20130716-2q1py.html

2. Online Journalism History

In January 2013:

Mail Online – 7.977 million unique browsers every day

Guardian – 4.319 million

Telegraph - 3.130 million

Sun - 1.816 million

Independent - 1.214 million

Mirror – 1.065 million

3. Citizen Journalism

“Citizen journalism refers to a range of web-based practices whereby ‘ordinary’ users engage in journalistic practices” – includes blogging, photo and video sharing, posting eyewitness commentary, etc. (Goode 2009, p. 1288). Indymedia -

http://www.indymedia.org/en/index.shtml

OhmyNews - http://international.ohmynews.com/

Guerrilla News Network - http://www.guerrillanews.com

3. Citizen Journalism

Challenge of professional journalistic norms – ‘amateur’ contributions, subjective reportage, greater variety of narrative forms, challenge of hierarchy of sources.

Online/new media technology use enables easier, cheaper, faster and more networked communication, available to a global public and also potentially enabling formation of ‘niche’ publics.

3. Citizen Journalism

What counts as ‘citizen journalism’?

Does citizen journalism have to have an oppositional, ‘leftist’ character?

Does it have to be an online form of journalism?

Social news or ‘metajournalism’ where people rate, comment on, tag and repost information - www.digg.com

3. Citizen Journalism

Should we restrict citizen journalism to content creators in contrast to forms of social news or metajournalism where people rate, comment, tag and repost information?- Journalism not just about the reporting of original material but also about interpreting, assessing and re-articulating material and in that sense metajournalism should be connected with new forms of journalism – citizen journalism and social news allow for new possibilities for citizen participation at various points along the chains of sense-making that shape news (Goode 2009, pp. 1290-1).

4. Online Journalism Issues

Ownership – Proliferation of online sources means we could have loosening of media ownership laws but continuing mainstream public reliance on traditional news sources undermine such arguments.

Quality – Concern about lower journalistic standards due to high level of recycling and redistribution of news stories, and increased workloads of online, multi-skilling journalists due to difficulty of producing successful online business model and attracting sufficient advertising revenue.

4. Online Journalism Issues

Rise of citizen journalism and UGC lead to quality concerns about loosening controls of journalistic professionalism and ethics, greater speculation in reportage and less diligent regard for facts.

Concern that such contexts are shifting emphasis from news reportage to commentary and opinion.

4. Online Journalism Issues

Counter argument that online resources make investigative journalism easier (McNair 2009, pp. 150-1).

http://www.propublica.org

http://www.exaronews.com

5. Twittersphere

Current range of social media networks including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc.

Twitter created in 2006. 140-character messages. Form of ‘micro-blogging’. Tweets, re-tweets, hashtags.

500 million users (271 million active) as of July 2014.

Facilitates greater public engagement and participation, yet still hierarchy of voices, more ‘niche’ publics, stratification between social media users and non-users, more aggressive public discourse.

http://ajrarchive.org/Article.asp?id=4756

5. Twittersphere

Twitter instrumental in breaking story about the Boston marathon bombing.

https://blog.twitter.com/2013/the-boston-bombing-how-journalists-used-twitter-to-tell-the-story

Twitter scandal involving Sally Bercow:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-22652083

5. Twittersphere

Twitter implicated in the ‘hybrid media system’:

As Ampofo, Anstead and O’Loughlin (2011) have noted, the commentariat of 24-hour rolling television news has given way to the viewertariat who are those “viewers who use online publishing platforms and social tools to interpret, publicly comment on, and debate a television broadcast while they are watching it” (Anstead & O’Loughlin 2011, p. 441).

5. Twittersphere

Twitter and social media has increased the temporality of news production:

It has been noted that the 24-hour news cycle is now the 21-minute news cycle due to the influence of Twitter after an incident on the 2012 Presidential election campaign trail where Romney joked that no one had asked to see his birth certificate, in response to the ‘birther’ conspiracy advocates who had questioned whether Obama was an American. Romney’s comment at a rally was tweeted three minutes later, on the website of Politico after four minutes, video of the comment could be viewed on Buzzfeed after five minutes, and the Romney team had a clarifying statement 21 minutes after the initial comment.

5. Twittersphere

Journalistic uses of Twitter:

Breaking news

Locating sources

Form of individual and news organisation branding

Follow newsworthy people, groups and organisations

Getting help from sources – crowdsourcing

Distributing content

Generating conversations

6. WikiLeaks

http://wikileaks.org

The ‘world’s most dangerous website’

6. WikiLeaks

Historical development of WikiLeaks reveals negotiation of the organisation’s identity, including its relationship to journalism.

In digital age the traditional whisteblower / journalist relationship has changed “with the whistleblower increasingly able to bypass the journalist altogether” (Allan 2013, p. 153).

6. WikiLeaks

Initial use of ‘wiki’ suggested enabling website users to edit or comment on posted data but this was quickly abandoned (Allan 2013, p. 154-5).

WikiLeaks as “journalistic tool” in Schmidt’s 2007 Time article.

2010 release of U.S. military Apache helicopter gunship footage of killings in Iraq saw WikiLeaks involved in decrypting and verifying footage saw it portrayed as “an Internet-savvy investigative journalism outfit” (Stray, cited in Allan 2013, p. 158).

6. WikiLeaks

July 2010 release of Afghanistan war logs and collaboration with Guardian, the New York Times, and Der Spiegel.

Criticisms from U.S. government. WikiLeaks described as “not an objective news organisation” and “an organisation with an ideological agenda” by Senator Joe Lieberman.

Tension between WikiLeaks and newspaper collaborators over nature of relationship.

6. WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks as “the world’s first stateless news organization” (Rosen, cited in Allan 2013, p. 164).

“We find the state, which holds the secrets but is powerless to prevent their release; the stateless news organisation, deciding how to release them; and the national newspaper in the middle, negotiating the terms of legitimacy between these two actors” (Rosen, cited in Allan 2013, p. 164).

WikiLeaks exposes mainstream journalism’s role in reproduction of normative order?

6. WikiLeaks

Assange described himself as “a journalist and publisher and inventor”.

WikiLeaks as “muckraker”

WikiLeaks situated between source and publisher?

WikiLeaks as ‘scientific journalism’? – “whereby readers are afforded access to a whistleblower’s witnessing of original source material so as to determine for themselves its relative significance” (Allan 2013, p. 154).

References

Allan, S 2013, Citizen Witnessing: Revisioning Journalism in Times of Crisis, Polity, Cambridge.

Ampofo, L, Anstead, N, & O’Loughlin, B 2011, ‘Trust, confidence, and credibility: citizen responses on Twitter to opinion polls during the 2010 UK general election’, Information, Communication & Society, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 850-871.

Anstead, N & O’Loughlin, B 2011, ‘The emerging viewertariat and BBC Question Time: television debate and real-time commenting online’, The International Journal of Press/Politics, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 440-462.

Bruns, A 2008, “Life beyond the public sphere: Towards a networked model for political deliberation”, Information Polity, vol. 13, pp. 65-79.

Chadwick, A 2013, The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Goode, L 2009, “Social news, citizen journalism and democracy”, New Media & Society, Vol. 11, No. 8, pp. 1287-1305.

McNair, B 2009, ‘Online journalism in the UK’, News and Journalism in the UK, 5th edn, Routledge, London.