THE CITIZEN JOURNALISM MANUAL…

16. Writing and distributing our stories

In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” …Eric Hoffer.

Motivation

BEFORE WE PUT FINGER to keyboard it might pay to sit quietly and think about our motivation in wanting to become citizen journalists. We also consider the type of journalism we would do: are we primarily writers? photographers? videographers? podcasters?

• what do we want to accomplish through our blogging?
• what do we know enough about to be able to write about it in an authoritative manner?
• what could we learn about so that we could become a credible writer on the topic and, perhaps, blog about our learning journey?
• do we need to do a little study to develop our writing skills? where would we find help in this?
• do we have a digital camera or a mobile phone with a decent quality camera so that we can make photographs to supplement our writing?
• do we need to learn a more about photography and photographic processing?
• do we have the motivation to blog regularly?
• do we have the time availability to produce regular content?
• do we have enough stories on a topic to sustain our writing? (list at least 10 stories you could write about to start, to assess whether there is a sufficient volume of material)
• do we have knowledge that others would benefit from?
• do we want to chronicle some project or activity we are engaged in?
• do we want to comment on something in the news or some social trend?
• do we want to write how-to guides?
• do we want to advocate some idea or social movement?
• do we want to publish our photogarphy or art online
• what else?

I became aware of the value of combining a couple of these while on a course in photojournalism when the instructor, a professional photojournalist, said I was fortunate in being able to combine writing and photography. That was verified when doing freelance writing later, when I found a story accompanied by a selection of photographs increased its saleability.

Writing and stills photography are the most common starting places in becoming a citizen journalist.

Choosing a format

Citizen journalists work in a range of online publishing formats:

• writing — text-based reporting
• photography — the publishing of stills images; these are accompanied by captions that context the image and give it meaning — there is a skill to caption writing that is easily picked-up; photographs often accompany text-based journalism and illustrate something in the text; they might be stand-alone, single-picture stories captioned with a few paragraphs to explain them, or might be grouped as a presentation of related photographs in a photo essay
• podcasting — producing and publishing audio stories as sound files; this is akin to radio documentary production and also includes commentary; fiction and instructional writers also make use of podcasting
• videography — the use of video cameras and editing software to tell a story.

Different formats can be combined in a single story. An audio file embedded in a text story might be a recording of an interview with one of the protagonists, for example.

Social media sites link people to our website. We post short descriptions and links to new stories or to past stories relevant to new discussions.

Our social media should not be all about us. It works best when it serves the people interested enough to link to us. This can be done by posting links to the work of others and reposting (it is good form to acknowledge the original source), by commenting on others’ social media postings, by asking questions of our readers to seek their experience and opinions, by running polls to find out what readers think of something and by finding and making available interesting resources to our readers. Asking for reader commentary expands our own knowledge of a topic or incident, revealing new information and perspectives that can change how we think about it. After the commentary ends we can publish an addendum (an update at the end of the original story; if the update is substantial it might be become a new story linked to the older) summarising new information gained through comments.

In becoming citizen journalists we find and use the social media and software platforms where our target readership gathers.

Distribution media

How do citizen journalists distribute their work and attract readers?

The main distribution channels for our work are likely to include:

• websites — that provide a repository for our work or that of the organisation we write/photograph for; here, stories and visual content is retained over the long term and can be found through search engines and by reposting links to it; photographers will look for websites and software offering a photo gallery function
• social media connects readers to our website, provides channels for reposting links to the work of others and for commenting on posts
• email distribution lists — one-to-many group email newsletters that link to website content.

Citizen journalists can keep readers up to date with their work and retain their readership by crafting a visually attractive email newsletter with links to stories on a website.

The comments window below social media posts offer a venue for conversations exploring the topic. Rather the comments being made on websites below the stories, it is on social media that conversations frequently take place when website content is distributed by social media.

Unlike the old media of newspapers, magazines, radio and TV which are one-to-many channels, online media offers many-to-many channels, providing a greater diversity of opinion, expertise and voices. It also gives voice to those overlooked by mainstream media.

Software enabled

For interests sake, let us take a brief side trip into the evolution of online communications.

Today’s worldwide web and social media evolved from the invention of the personal computer — first the desktop, then the laptop, now the mobile device. Its social history is described in Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture.

In 1993 the Mosiac browser introduced the graphic user interface that made accessing online systems easier. Netscape followed, then Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari, then open source products like Mozilla’s Firefox and on to secure onion browsers like Tor. Accompanying these was an evolving set of website authoring tools. Publishing platforms like Medium offer a venue for citizen journalists that helps gain readers.

Early website authoring and design software created one-to-many websites in which there was no way for readers to comment on articles or cooperate online. This is known as the read-only web, Web 1.0. Viewers could only read content in a passive manner. New software that allowed commenting and sometimes collaboration created the interactive read-write web, Web 2.0, around the turn of the century that evolved to include social media, wikis and other formats.

We can trace the origins of social media back to the eighties when America Online (AOL) linked people through dial-up connections using modems connected to the telephone network. Compuserve arrived a few years earlier. It was followed by Usenet, bulletin boards and, in 1992, Friendster. In 1993, the worldwide web was made more easily accessible through the development of the Mosaic browser, the first graphical user interface. Myspace arrived in 2003 and Facebook a year later, moving out of the university and into the public realm in 2006. Other social networks followed.

If there is a true precursor to today’s social networking sites, it was likely spawned under the AOL (America Online) umbrella. In many ways, and for many people, AOL was the internet before the internet, and its member-created communities were arguably the service’s most fascinating, forward-thinking feature… The History of Social Networking.

The value of the network

Social media uses the model of the network to distribute the material on our website and short pieces and photography we publish on it.
Stories are picked up and linked to by readers and are in turn again picked up and distributed. This is how networks work — by passing on information.

In network theory terms, newspapers were a centralised network with the publisher at centre, the newsagents that sold the newspapers as hubs (nodes with many connections) and readers as the individual nodes. Other than the letter to the editor that might or might not be published, there was no reciprocity in this network, no way of commenting on a story. This was one-to-many communication, a centralised network of information distribution.

Now that newspapers have moved online, their comments sections accompanying stories bring them some of the characteristics of the interactive network (because some conversations became bitter and abusive some newspapers have closed their comments feature). Story production remains the province of the professional journalist remunerated by the newspaper.

Blogging and social networks bring the opportunity for anyone sufficiently motivated to become a writer or to publish their photo or video stories. Once published there is no knowing where our stories and photographs will end up, however we can be sure that errors will be noticed and commented on and that our information will be challenged. That is why following some of the practices in the following sections if this book will help retain our credibility as a blogger.

No matter how demonstratively true our facts, no matter how much evidence we provide or link to, there are people who will nevertheless disbelieve what we write. Nothing we do will convince them because they are under the control of their chosen ideology, religious belief or other mindset that shuts out logical and rational conversation.

Finding our audience

Today’s internet is a crowded place and it requires searching to find our readership or viewers. This has to go beyond tagging our work with meaningful, descriptive and findable words and learning a little about search engine optimisation. It requires actively going out and searching for potential audiences. This is an ongoing process.

When we know what and where we will publish, we are ready to make a start.