iReporter? No, that's an Eyewitness

Great LATimes piece fussing at CNN and its use of "iReporters" when they're really eyewitnesses. The "iReporter" provided vital information about the F/A-18D crash in San Diego -- it was awful. It was terrible.

That's not reporting.

In the piece by Patt Morrison, "But whenever the [CNN] anchor asked for hard specifics -- how many people in the jet, whether he or she or they ejected safely, the sort of thing that constitutes the core of news reporting -- the ''iReporter'' had to keep referring to what that she'd seen or heard on the local news."

A reporter weaves from a tapestry of eyewitness accounts, trained observation, facts and figures, expert commentary, and skill with the written or spoken word, depending on your platform. Saying it was terrible, it was awful. That's not reporting, with or without an "i" stuck cleverly before it in lower case.

I understand the sometimes desperate need for "i" before a word, be it "pod" or "tunes" or "reporter" or whatever the hell else we can come up with. It looks cool. It says we're about the people, we're involving the audience, we're getting cheap, unpaid, often unskilled labor and using it to our journalistic advantage. These are tough times in the news business, but at some point this all becomes a bit silly, a bit sad.

Am I against citizen journalism? No, though that's as god-awful a phrase as public journalism or whatever last year's craze was called, and I'm not convinced what people know about the world is actually helped, and is probably hurt, by reliance on this kind of mediocre content.

Citizen Journalism and Knowing

Sometimes what people know is wrong.

The journalism field has been abuzz since last week when a citizen journalist posted on CNN's iReport that Apple guru Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack. A great version of the problem is here.

This false report affected stocks, got the feds involved. It provides a whipping boy, or case study, (depending on your take) on the idea of citizen journalism.

Bad facts, bad story. But the CNN iReport community did what online communities are supposed to do. According to CNN, "the community brought it to our attention." In other words, real online communities create and maintain their space, they self correct the problems that emerge, or often they shout down the people who are obscene, are trolls, or who are just plain wrong.

So I'm of two minds here. The pro journalist side of me, who has done it for real and who teaches it at a j-school, dislikes the idea of anyone posting to something like CNN without the traditional rules of verification. But the new media realist in me likes the idea of communities maintaining their own space, fixing the problems that emerge.

So what's it all mean for what people know? Ah, here lies the danger. Ideas get lodged in the public mind, even untrue ones. It's damn hard to dislodge those misconceptions and all it takes is one friggin stupid story to do the job.

Sometimes when a thousand citizen journalists bloom, the fertilizer smell is hard to avoid.