Every once in a while I receive an interview request from a journalism student who wants my views on some aspect of digital journalism. Last week Adam Kveton of Carleton University was interested in how social media affected the Vancouver Stanley Cup riot and The Province‘s coverage of it. Here’s our e-mail interview:
Did journalists learn anything from citizen journalists throughout the Vancouver riots? Is there something that they are doing that we as journalists need to adopt?
Journalists vary widely in their affinity for, and aptitude with, digital tools. To many journalists, citizen reporters weren’t doing anything new during the riot. Other journalists might have had their eyes opened a bit. Still others, I’m afraid, don’t care and just want to keep doing the job the way they’ve always done it. My point is that it all depends on the individual journalist.
I noticed some citizens on the ground during the riot who were doing fantastic work and whom I would gladly have had on my staff. I can’t really say they taught me anything, because it’s my job to stay current on trends in real-time reporting and mobile tools. However, they were matching and in some cases exceeding the work of professional journalists in the field that night, because not all journalists have gotten serious about mastering this type of reporting.
One thing that did impress me was the speed with which Facebook pages and dedicated websites appeared during the riot. The ability to conceive and execute mini-projects that can capitalize on sudden interest in a hot topic is becoming increasingly important to news organizations, and some private citizens were really agile with it that night.
How do we as journalists have to change in light of social media taking over what, traditionally, has been a mainstream media role. What is our role now?
We have to find the good stuff. The volume of content on riot night was overwhelming, and while some people might enjoy sifting through all that, a large part of our audience doesn’t have the time or inclination to do so. When an event is getting blanket coverage on social networks, the journalist’s job is pull together what’s most significant or interesting, and make sure it’s authentic. It’s really an evolution of editing. Great film editors say they leave 90 per cent of footage on the cutting-room floor so what’s left is only the best of the best. Our audience should be able to come to us knowing they’re going to get only the top 10 per cent of citizen-generated social media coverage, so they aren’t wasting their time looking at multiple versions of essentially the same blurry picture.
Journalists used to be able to withhold videotapes and pictures from the police (in certain circumstances) because, if they handed over everything they had, their ability to collect this sort of information would be polluted in that no one would allow us to videotape them or take pictures of them etc. Now that everyone is a potential multimedia journalist, and what’s more, an eye for the police, what does this mean for new gathering? Do we just re-produce what citizens are posting online themselves? And how do we put that in context if that is what we are doing?
News organizations can now use readily available tools to easily embed or otherwise highlight social media content. When we do this, we don’t consider it our content and the police don’t, either. So it’s unlikely they would come after us for that — only for our original content.
Our position with regard to police requests hasn’t changed. We don’t hand our original content over. If they want it, they have to go through proper legal channels. In my opinion, there was more than enough citizen content publicly available from the Stanley Cup riot for police to carry out their investigation.
We will continue to do our own news gathering. I would never leave it all up to citizen journalists, because you don’t know what you’re going to get. You have to be there. You know you’re going to get quality photos from your own photographers and good, accurate reporting from your own staff. The citizen stuff, if it comes, is mostly complementary.
