Participatory journalism & Public/civic journalism

1. Participatory journalism &Public/civic journalism NSS Intensive Course Dar es Salaam, June 2010 Ullamaija Kivikuru

2. Factors contributing to the rise of the theme of participation • Media modes changed (distance to the receiver grown) • Journalism changed from handicraft to assembly-line formats (newsification) • Potential embedded in new technology • Develpment: New approaches of development communication • Politics: One-issue movements, disappointment with conventional parties

3. Forms of participatory communication • Media: contact programmes, web discussion arenas, community media • Journalism: Citizen-assisted journalism (public/citizen journalism) • Journalism: Citizen-run journalism (civic journalism) • Alternative communication: demonstrations, face-to-face, dancing, etc.

4. Ideology: Participatory Communication(Paulo Freire) ”Dialogic action”: combination of action and reflection Knowledge sharing (opposite to expert orientation) Self-reliance (human resource development AND economic dimension) Liberation & people’s power -> conscientization = critical awareness of one’s situation Stages of conscientization: access to information ability to interpret information (media literacy, etc.) emancipation (knowing who you are, identity) empowerment (ability & willingness to act for change)

5. Community media • 1960s in India (educational), West Africa (educational) and Latin America (political) • ”Literacy papers” in the 1970s (Africa) • Popularity grew in the 1990s (media & democracy -> multimedia centres) • SriLanka, Thailand, South Africa (roughly 120), Mozambique (roughly 50), Ghana (60) • Established by state organs, NGOs/donors, some by communities themselves • USA: 1920s, 1990s, Europe: 1980s, 21st century

6. IndyMedia Movement Slogans ”Journalism by the people”, ”Everybody is a reporter” Started in the late 1980s In 1999, activists in Seattle created a response to the WTO meeting. (criticism of the coverage in established media) Means: weblogs, chatrooms, messageboards, wikipedia, polls, editorials to be submitted and voted on In South Korea, OhmyNews commercially successful with the motto, "Every Citizen is a Reporter." "Instead of being the gatekeeper, telling people that what's important to them 'isn't news,' we're just opening up the gates and letting people come on in. We are a better community newspaper for having thousands of readers who serve as the eyes and ears for the Voice, rather than having everything filtered through the views of a small group of reporters and editors."

7. Types of citizen media Audience participation (such as user comments attached to news stories, personal blogs, photos or video footage captured from personal cameras, or local news written by residents of a community) Independent news and information websites Full-fledged participatory news sites (e.g. NowPublic, OhmyNews, GroundReport) Collaborative and contributory media sites Other kinds of "thin media" (mailing lists, email newsletters) Personal broadcasting sites (video broadcast sites, etc.) New media theorist Terry Flew states that there are 3 elements critical to the rise of citizen journalism and citizen media: open publishing, collaborative editing and distributed content.

8. Forms of alternative & participatory journalism Civic journalism Citizen/Public journalism Participatory online news reporting: open publishing (Wikinews, etc.) Fanzines & enzines (football, comics, film, popular music,soaps) Blogs IndyMedia, OneWorld & other social justice networks Street papers (Big Issue, etc.) Community media ”New journalism” (rejuvenating the trend from US, 1960s)

9. Alternative Media Global Project Example of global networking Concepts not very clear, not interested in them but in “working in another manner” The worldmap (on the website) seeks to graphically display the location of any alternative, radical, citizen, participatory, community media project in the world. The purpose is to create an interactive chart of the world of alternative media. (http://www.ourmedianetwork.org/wiki/ ). OURMedia conferences: Bangalore (2005) on media democratisation, Sydney (2007) on sustainability of citizens’ media and Accra (2008) on inclusion, identity and innovation Dialogue between development policies and the world of alternative and citizens’ media 

10. Pew Center(www.pewcenter.org) The Pew Center reports on various civic journalism experiments around the US, sharing the lessons learned and tracking how those experiments are evolving. Quarterly newsletters, training publications and videos, conferences and workshops for journalists and academics, research, public speaking. A resource also for civic journalism activity abroad (contacts with community media). Techinique: Community mapping

11. Examples in the margins of conventional journalism • NowPublic (US): platform for foreign news • Backfence communities (US): do-it-yourself platform for local news • BBC Action Network: local communities encouraged to discuss topics of public interes • Headlines (Dutch): encourages young people to contribute with written, audio or video reports

12. Public/Civic journalismJay Rosen, Davis Merritt • Journalism should focus on issues that are vital for the receivers, not for the sources • Journalism must present these issues in such a way that ordinary people can easily understand them • The main means of presentation are debate and conversation (showing alternatives) • Even basic values (e.g. objectivity) should be challenged • The media should mobilise receivers (”I do not want to inform the public but to form publics”, Jay Rosen)

13. Participatory journalism • ”Prosumer = consumer-turned-producer • Convergence between top-down and bottom-up journalisms • Blurs the boundaries between users, producers and sources • Still dependent on mainstream news organisations, whose output it debates, critiques and recombines