No country for Old Journalists

A new generation of journalists are upon us. They favor the world wide web rather than the printed page. They are called "Citizen Journalists."
Many of them will never receive green backs for their labor and yet they soldier on in the name idealism, fun or gossip. They lack the ability to pierce the stories requiring press badges but regardless they can do a lot by being at the right place at the right time. Cell phones and the web 2.0 are injecting these young guns with with potent steroids, allowing them to challenge and even change the traditional news process.

Lets examine the evidence.

Comedian Michael Richards' racial tirade in a L.A club was caught on a camera phone. (by an audience member who decided to put the footage up on the biggest wire in existence, the internet.) Recently an undercover video in a slaughterhouse "led to the largest beef recall in the United States." (according the You-tube) The big dogs of journalism are repeatedly relying on a trashy celebrity site called TMZ.com and a poplar video site called You-tube. The Web no longer follows the news, the news follows the web, and those who power the web are citizen journalists.

The web 2.0 is still not finished, for its next trick- respectability.

CNN.com is now pushing its own brand of citizen journalism with its I-Reports. (Visit the beta by going to http://beta.ireport.com/index.jspa) The site takes reports from all across the world, accepts other language reporting besides English and is updated continuously by "I-Reporters."
Of course, putting the news in the hands of the citizenry is nothing new, but such a big establishment as CNN validates its legitimacy as a reporting tool.

The future is both exultant and murky for this new medium. On one hand the man-on-the-ground access will allow CNN to field stories long out of its reach. On the other, CNN may be bombarded by a new wave of "citizen activists" who will use the power of the press for their politics. The citizens journalists are dilettantes who are responsible to nobody and answer to no one.