What follows is a transcript of an 8-minute radio interview on British Columbia’s province-wide morning show on CBC, Early Edition with Rick Cluff.
CBC - Vancouver based website Orato.com was considered a bold experiment in citizen journalism when it was launched three years ago and recently some big changes have taken place. Orato.com now has a new sleek look and features professional journalists and that’s got one expert lamenting the loss of the original Orato. Alfred Hermida is a professor of journalism at UBC who joins us on the line from Toronto and here in the studio with us is the new Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Orato.com Joy Gugeler. Good morning and welcome to you both. Joy, let me start with you. Orato.com was seen as a place to get a different kind of news reporting because it was directly from untrained amateurs telling their stories. Now you’re turning to professional and changing the look of it. Why?
Joy - We are actually still reliant on the majority of our material from citizen journalists - people who wouldn’t have gone to professional journalism programs or have been trained in the field and have a professional portfolio - but we actually have a pro-am model, ie professional and amateurs. So, we rely on the writers to self-define to a certain extent and instead of offering unedited content to the reader, which is less valuable to them to a certain extent, given the pressures on search these days to deliver the answers quickly, concisely and correctly. I think we’re working with writers one-on-one as editors, with their permission of course and involvement, and that’s something that they’ve actually asked for and consider valuable in this media era in which job retraining is so important.
CBC -And Alfred why is it so important for you to have untrained recorders share news-worthy stories?
Alfred - I think one of the issues here is that citizen journalism is really a bit of a myth. The idea is that there is this army of untrained amateurs who are willing to go out and report the news and in a sense do the job of professional journalists. In fact that doesn’t happen. It takes training to be a professional journalist like it does for you to be a radio presenter or an athlete who competes in the marathon versus an amateur who takes part in say the Vancouver Sun Run. So what we would get from members of the public is very very different and not necessarily the type of reporting you’d expect from a professional that has everything you need to know in the story. It may instead offer their personal perspective, their take on it with all the flaws that might come with that. It could be very personal, there might be facts wrong, but it doesn’t matter because it comes from one individual person. You can judge it on the basis of what you’re getting from that person.
CBC - Joy, when this first happened this was seen as edgy and new. Do you think now that you’ve had to change it a bit that it’s a sign of a failed experiment?
Joy - It’s an experiment that has evolved just as the Internet has over the last ten years and if you stand still in this environment - like a house in New York, you get renovated essentially. You have to evolve and if you don’t stay fleet-footed then you don’t become a viable business model. While we’re responsible to our writers and readers primarily, we are also a privately-owned business responsable to our owner. The bottom line is that experiment wasn’t paying writers and it wasn’t paying its owner and we would have had to close our doors and then the experimented would have been over. So I think what we’ve done is try to find a way to reward writers for their efforts, to reward readers with stronger content that’s easier to find, and we’ve also preserved something that I think is rarer and rarer, which is edited content on the Net. I’m interested that Alfred is so concerned about the loss of citizen journalism when in fact that’s the majority of what you find online. It’s all blogger.com and Wordpress and YouTube and there’s no shortage of it. I understand that you preserve something in an era of scarcity, something that’s rare. In fact what’s rare is the ability to work one-on-one with an editor and to get that experience.
Alfred - I’m not lamenting the loss of citizen journalism per se because I don’t believe citizen journalism exists. What we are tring to do with the idea of citizen journalism is take what journalists have done and say, well, this is what members of the public should be doing. We’re taking existing ways of working and saying this is what you as a member of the public should be doing, but rather when it comes to getting the input of people. If somebody sees an accident on the Port Mann Bridge, they might ring in, they might send a photo, but it’s the journalist who’s going to write the piece explaining not only what happened, but why it happened. The other thing here is that maybe the value of getting involved with the audience isn’t getting them to write a story the way we’ve traditionally defined it, but instead to involve them in a conversation where the discussion around a story makes it a new form of journalism by people involved in that story. So it’s not that I lament the fact that there is not this raw unfiltered, unedited content, but rather that when we think about how we can have more voices in the news, story format is only one way of doing it. Instead, maybe we should explore some different ways, like engaging conversations, engaging in discussions online where all these voices together create a new form of journalism.
Joy - I agree and I don’t think that were really on opposite ends of the spectrum; I think it’s a question of nuance. I agree with Alfred that the term citizen journalism is somewhat passe and needs to be redefined at best. Our tagline is “speak from experience” and certainly that intimate, personal, “I was there. I know about it. I want to share my knowledge.” is relevant, but also he’s talking about things in the sphere of current affairs and hard news. World Affairs is only one of ten sections on Orato, so there’s a lot of soft news where the way in which the story is told does involve video and audio.
CBC - When I hear the word “journalist,” and having a degree in journalism myself, is there an expectation of truth and fact involved here? When you have citizens reporting and calling themselves citizen journalists, who is responsible for the accuracy of the report?
Alfred - Well in a sense what we are seeing with the rise of so many sources online is that it puts the emphasis more on us as the readers to make sense of it. In the past we may have had our news from one of only a few sources - the morning newspaper, the radio show, the evening newscast on TV - but now we have news all around us and in essence that’s a really good thing, but it also puts an emphasis on us as the reader to say, “Well, I’m going to trust this and going to read this maybe with a bit of skepticism” or “I’m going to look at this, which has been done by an amateur writer on a Website and I will see whether there might be something there that’s valuable to me, but I have to check it against other sources.” So in a sense it’s a far more complicated news ecosphere and it puts a lot more pressure on us as the reader, as the audience, to in a sense navigate and make sense of all this information .
CBC - Joy, what makes Orato unique now?
Joy - I think what makes it unique is that it is a platform on which writers can instantly come to the site, post their story and within twenty-four hours work with an editor to make sure that that story can be found. That the title is transparent, that it is clear and easy to read, and that the article is going to instantly get traffic and a share of ad revenue. It is a multimedia site offering video and audio and comments and interactivity with our audience and that’s something that writers really want, but they want something that looks good enough to put in a portfolio too and they want an opportunity to work with professionals because they self-define as somebody who has the aspiration not only to report one event and then never to be seen from again, but to actually do it on an ongoing basis, which of course is what we need for our business model. It has to be evergreen content.
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