A recent research report from Missouri University compared mainstream news sites (“MNS”) with 100+ citizen news sites/blogs. The conclusions reached are perplexing. In short, they claim that citizen journalists/ bloggers are failing to fill the “information shortfall” and are not suitable substitutes for MNS. The only bit of silver lining is that citizen journalism is complementary to legacy news sites due to citizen journalists’ contributions on the opinion and hyperlocal front. The report conveys a sense of failure on citizen journalism and concern that citizen journalists will never fill the gap as traditional media companies continue to struggle.
Let’s take a step back here. Is this a fair apples-to-apples comparison?
On one hand, you have a big established company and brand with a newsroom staff (albeit a shrinking one) and technological resources at their disposal, as well as a sales team and usually a print circulation business (albeit a declining one) bringing in revenue. On the other hand, most citizen journalists and bloggers are operating out of their own house, taking advantage of free online resources for publishing needs. They probably have no sales team in charge of revenue, and they’ll usually cover and write about what they’re passionate about.
In short, it’s not a fair nor useful comparison.
Rather, what the research report tries to do is like comparing a supermarket to a specialty food shop. The big supermarket is clean, well lit, organized and offers an overwhelming variety of products: a one-stop shop. However, I might have a taste for a particular brand of coffee that’s not available at the supermarket. And I sometimes would prefer to get my produce from the farmers’ market and may go out of my way for fresh bread at a local bakery. Any one of these specialty shops could never fully replace the supermarket experience— however, if I hit up enough of them, I may not need to go to the supermarket at all.
In other words, citizen news sites/blogs could potentially serve as a replacement for MNS – if their content were organized in useful, coherent ways, enabling consumers to find it quickly and easily. The fairer comparison here would be to take a look at the MNS versus the collected, organized set of citizen news sites/blogs in a given market.
If we took all of the relevant content from citizen journalists and bloggers who are covering town hall meetings, local sports teams, restaurant openings and reviews – as well as a few feature pieces and investigative reports – the ‘little guys,’ might have a shot at going head-to-head with a MNS. One or two blogs would not suffice, obviously, since most of these sites are narrowly focused by design and simply do not have the resources (or desire) to provide round-the-clock coverage. However, when the sites are aggregated, the results are pretty solid; for example, searching for local news in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago on Outside.in shows me a weekend guide from Daily Candy, some information on the weekend’s Pitchfork Music Festival, restaurant news from Chowhound, a couple of crime stories from the Chicago Tribune, and a post on fund-raising efforts for a local theatre. The results are fairly comprehensive and improving each day, as new sources of content become available for aggregation.
According to Missouri School of Journalism associate professor Margaret Duffy, “While many of the blogs and citizen journalism sites have done very interesting and positive things, they are not even close to providing the level of coverage that even financially stressed news organizations do today.”
At Outside.in, we definitely agree with the first part of this statement: we’re aggregating over 45,000 feeds and we see interesting and positive content being produce by blogs and citizen journalists on a daily basis (case in point: the blogs highlighted in our Bloggers We Love series). That said, we’d have to take issue with Ms. Duffy’s contention that citizen journalists and hyperlocal bloggers are “not even close,” to rivaling MNS. It’s simply the wrong comparison: of course the little guy, individually, will never be able to rival the big guy, at least not as far as news coverage is concerned. Instead of pitting individual citizen journalists and local bloggers against MNS, we should take a step back and look at the collective whole of the content created by citizen journalists and local bloggers in a given news market. With this wider view, we’re not seeing much of an “information shortfall,” at all. On the contrary, it looks like ‘Team Little Guy,’ may be on the rise.
