Should news organizations try to train non-journalists to provide content for their Web sites? Lots of them are trying, but some experts say it’s a total waste of time.
It’s understandable that newsrooms might want to offer training. Their goals are often laudable: to improve the quality of user-generated video, for example, or to share ethical guidelines for user-generated content. SPJ’s Citizen Journalism Academy, for example, is designed “to help everyone wanting to practice journalism to do so accurately, ethically and fairly.”
But self-interest is often a big part of the equation. A Michigan newspaper group offered a one-day training session for citizens this summer and then planned to put them to work covering features or police news. The Oakland Press has an Institute for Citizen Journalism
…offering anyone who is interested — from high school students to retirees — instruction in news writing, videography, basics of reporting for news and sports, and still photography. For those who complete the instruction, we offer the opportunity to get your work published online or in the print edition.
Is this kind of thing worth the effort? Not in the least, says Mark Potts, CEO of GrowthSpur and founder of the now-defunct hyperlocal news site, Back Fence. “You can’t train people to be citizen journalists. It fails massively,” he told a group of journalists from around the world meeting in Washington, DC, last week. “They want to be community members, not journalists.”
At Back Fence, Potts tried paying citizens to contribute but it backfired. “That’s not why they do it,” he said. “If you get too professional about it, they stay away.”
Jan Schaffer of J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism agrees that newsroom training programs for citizen journalists don’t work. “The retention rate is virtually zero,” she says, and she should know. Her organization developed the Knight citizen news network and tracked efforts in newsrooms from Kansas to Idaho to train citizen journalists.
So if formal training is a flop, what should news organizations do to get citizens more involved in producing quality content? Instead of trying to train them to do journalism, Potts suggests, offer general tips on writing or photography. Show them how to shoot better pictures or better video of their kids. If that improves the user-generated content on your site, so much the better.
But don’t bother trying to turn citizens into journalists–something they apparently don’t want to be. Take a tip from the latest survey by the Pew Research Center. The vast majority of Americans, more than 70%, don’t think news organizations get the facts straight. Is it any wonder they don’t want us to train them to do what we do?
2 Comments
I work with DigitalJournal.com, a global news network made up of citizen journalists all over the world. We think teaching and training is incredibly important in the world of citizen journalism because not everyone knows the ins and outs or even the basics. In fact, our news site is built on that premise; we edit work, fact check, call sources to confirm quotes and speak one-on-one with all of our reporters.
When you train someone, you answer a lot of basic and complicated questions that then make that citizen reporter far more capable and skilled. You get better interviews, more information and better stories.
We run regular online classes that are entirely free, teaching subjects like libel and defamation; removing bias from news articles; how to interview effectively; and how to write a profile. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
I agree that providing general tips is helpful for those who don’t want to go neck-deep into reporting, but for the thousands of people we work with every day it has been a very big plus.
I was hoping someone would weigh in in favor of training citizens to be journalists. Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Chris. I think the folks who’ve decided it’s a waste of time are running different kinds of sites. They don’t really want citizens to provide them with news stories, but rather “to capture the conversation [they’re already having] and stay out of the way,” as Mark Potts puts it. If you’re trying to get community members to cover stories the way a journalist would, then training could make sense. I’m a journalism trainer myself, of course, so I’d like to believe it’s worthwhile. But the folks I quoted say that even though people are happy to get training, they don’t stay committed to the sites that train them for very long. Have you had a different experience in terms of retention at DigitalJournal.com?