Why Citizen Journalism is the only Real Journalism

Journalism is one of my favorite things about the United States. I love the way that, under the conceptual protection of our first amendment, the labor of gathering and reporting news turns into a righteous enterprise, conducted by relentless, sometimes even monomaniacal agents. I’m not talking, as you might guess, about the unblushing propaganda chattered out by network television news. Nor am I talking about the uninteresting and outmoded junk that fills our nations newspapers and magazines. (What a waste of paper that these things still exist.)

It’s not shocking to say that those forms of journalism are a relic, and what these media produce now is never better than what they can do with a slashed budget and a third rate crew. All the talent left these old media years ago, if they weren’t layed off. Every bit of media that isn’t the internet is a withering bush, now. And its journalism is dying with it. The only legitimate American style journalism, marked by belligerence to authority and obsessed with the Big Story, however dangerous it might be–the only practitioners of that are on the internet.

Citizen journalists, independent or working in groups, self-funded or crowd funded, full-time investigative reporters or the happenstance cell-phone photographer–the category in all its variety is the only place where actual American-style journalism is taking place anymore. At all.

This is not a small change, but neither is it really new. Journalism in the English speaking world has always been an independent endeavor, if not always free. It was only with the rise of big newspaper publishers that journalism began to take on a conglomerate form. And even then it was still Hearst vs. Pulitzer. It took the advent of new technologies to turn journalism into a cloistered profession. The newspaper empires of the 19th century became the television and radio networks of the 20th. These technologies were (regressively) transformative not only because their form and higher cost required changes, but also because for the first time since the American Revolution, the literal media on which the news traveled was subject to licensing by the government. (This of course had much to do with the finitude of the broadcast spectra, though the problem could just as easily been left to the public.)

And so, just as it had been in colonial times, the government was once again a gatekeeper. Newspapers and magazines might still evade government control, as if to take “freedom of the press” absolutely literally, but radio and television would be owned and operated only at the pleasure of the Government. Over the decades radio and especially television grew up into powerful monoliths, owned by a dwindling pool of media corporations.

The era lasted roughly half a decade. From the hydrogen bomb to the World Trade Center, the greater portion of our news and information came from tightly managed sources. Americans knew less and less about what was going on in the world. Tightly controlled news, coupled with streams of pablum-grade entertainment, benumbed the nation and added more layers of unreality to our perceptions of the world.But even as technology usurped the natural state of journalism, corporatizing what was once independent, locking down what once was free, it was technology once again that destroyed the information control matrix: the internet.

People talk about citizen journalism as if were something new. It is not new; it is the way journalism was always meant to be. Independent, nonprofessionalized, anarchic and adversarial, true journalism is the work of individuals.