Zvi Reich of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev presented a comparison at the International Communication Association’s annual conference in Montreal: three mainstream Israeli news organisations set against Scoop, an Israeli citizen journalism site. On his count, 52 per cent of the material on Scoop was original news reporting rather than opinion or fragments recycled from the mainstream press.
The sourcing differences were the sharper finding. The mainstream reporters worked from official sources and press officers; the Scoop contributors worked from internet sources or from being physically present where something happened. Mainstream reporters were in daily or weekly contact with the people they quoted, while the citizen journalists were approaching a source for the first time in about half of their stories — and half of those stories rested on a single source. Even the channel differed: phone calls on one side, e-mail and meetings on the other.
Reich’s recommendations followed from the fragility he found. Sites of this kind needed a critical mass of both contributors and readers, a way to stabilise a volunteer workforce that is volatile by nature, and training for contributors, sourcing above all — which amounts to asking citizen journalists to become more like the professionals they were being measured against.
Natalie Fenton of Goldsmiths College raised that objection during the discussion, and it reaches the design of the study itself: measuring citizen journalism against professional definitions assumes those definitions are the standard. The prior question — what counts as news once the number of available sources has multiplied — was the one the comparison left alone.