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Abstract
A systematic study of day-to-day practices of citizen reporters, compared to their mainstream counterparts, suggests that ordinary citizens can serve as a vital complement to mainstream journalism, however not as its substitute. The paper develops a version of the “news access” theory, which sees citizen journalists as hindered by their inferior access to news sources, unlike mainstream journalism, where the problem is seen as the superior access of some of their sources to extensive and favored coverage. There are several symptoms for citizen reporters’ limited news access: their modest use of human sources; the high proportion of one-source items; their reluctance to interactively negotiate versions with sources; and their contacts with sources tend to be ad hoc exchanges, rather than long-term role relationships. On the other hand, citizen reporters have adopted several mechanisms that help them make up for their comparably limited access. They are much more likely to pursue stories at their own initiative. They tend to predicate their stories on firsthand witnessing, technical sources (mainly Internet), personal acquaintances, and on their own experience. Data were gleaned from a series of interviews in which reporters from Israeli citizen and mainstream news websites explained how they formulated their sampled items.
Acknowledgements
The author is indebted to the Burda Center for Innovative Communication for its generous support. Thanks are also due to Mr. Tomer Hendl and Mr. Guy Levi, from the Department of Communication Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, for helping to compile the data and Mrs. Tali Avishay-Arbel for her statistical advice.
Notes
1. Forty-nine percent of all Israelis use broadband (Mor, Citation2006; OECD, Citation2007).
2. Tsfati and Livio studied inter alia the extent to which reporters believe their audiences are interested in news and politics. The interest levels reported by Israeli reporters were much higher than those of their counterparts in the United States, Germany and Mexico.
3. Similar to its South Korean role model, Scoop is predicated on the contributions of ordinary citizens (about 1000 registered contributors at the time of the study). The site also employs four full-time editors, who are responsible for the news selection and editing. The site is profit-oriented and its business plan includes advertising revenues and a business partnership with a cellular operator.
4. Ynet and NRG employ considerable staffs of their own reporters and thus generally avoid repurposing “shovelware” from the print edition of the same publishing groups.
5. Content analysis is limited to the news product, so that the researcher can only speculate as to the nature of the underlying process (Manning, Citation2001, p. 48). Interviews can be somewhat problematic when the interviewees themselves are professional interviewers. Although observations can solve some of these problems, citizen reporters are too scattered to allow for systematic observations and mainstream news organizations are inclined to refuse requests for observations (Underwood, 1996).
6. Ynet and NRG were represented by 100 news items a piece. In the case of Haaretz Online, which relies on the same staff for its online and print editions, reporters were asked to reconstruct eight items that only appeared on the online version, in order to keep the interviews down to size (another eight items that only appeared in the print version were reconstructed by these reporters for another study). Two items were missing, leaving a total of 78 samples.
7. The advantage of the double analysis is that the data reflect the peculiarities of each phase. Despite the double analysis, the differences between the two stages were still remarkable.
8. D-statistic was used to gauge differences between the averages of the citizen and mainstream interval variables. They were calculated as the average of the citizens, minus the average of the mainstream reporters, divided by the pooled estimate of standard deviation.
9. Upon receiving a new submission, the first thing that Scoop's editors do is Google the story's keywords in order to make sure that the item was not already published. According to the editor-in-chief, Yossi Saidov, some 10 percent of all the submissions are rejected on these very grounds.
10. In order to give the reader a taste of Scoop's finest work, I asked the editor-in-chief to choose the three best pieces from the list of the sampled items. To follow are his choices (headlines are followed by a short recap):
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Chief Doctor of the Parachuters Brigade: “We Were Forced to Leave Wounded Soldiers in the Field During the War.” Elad Shalev, a soldier, reported on an internal meeting that was held by combat medical officers in the aftermath of the Second Lebanon War (published March 7, 2007).
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The Office of the Prime Ministers’ Response to Citizen's Appeals: “Olmert Is Busy with the Reform of the Vehicle Tax.” This was the official response that Jacob Avid, the story's author, received to queries on different matters that he had sent to the website of the Office of the Prime Minister (published February 28, 2007).
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Clalit Health Services Turned Down a Cancer Patient's Request for a Metastasis Test. Dany Bar broke the story of a cancer patient. The test was ultimately approved thanks in part to Bar's appeal (published February 26, 2007).
11. A few of the items were presented in a weekly segment on Channel Two, Israel's most popular television network, featuring the best citizen stories of the past week. According to the editor-in-chief, mainstream reporters plagiarized some of the stories.
12. While in both phases mainstream news reporters had 134 contacts with non-senior sources—20 percent of which involved private individuals—the citizen reporters had 102 contacts with non-senior sources, 72 percent of which involved private individuals.
13. All the technologies and communication channels were divided into two groups: reporter-initiated contacts, including outgoing land-line and cellular telephone calls, Internet searches, face-to-face interviews, on-the-scene reporting, archival research, and documents handed over at the reporter's request; and source-initiated contacts, which comprise incoming land-line and cellular telephone calls, faxes, pagers, e-mail and instant messages, information published by other media, and documents that sources handed over at their own initiative.
14. See Note 13.
15. The discrepancies here are striking. During the discovery phase, on-the-scene reporting comprised 0.12 of Scoop's contacts versus only 0.04 of the mainstream websites’ reporters (D-statistic = − 0.29); the numbers swelled to 0.16 and 0.07 in the gathering phase (D-statistic = − 0.32). The Internet accounted for 0.15 of the discovery information and 0.22 of the gathering data at Scoop, but only 0.03 of mainstream websites’ information in both phases (D-statistic = − 0.44 for the discovery phase and 0.73 for the gathering phase).
16. During internal staff meetings, several reporters reiterated their desire for more PR material.
17. Among the top-notch stories was a paramedic who reported on his team's efforts to resuscitate a patient; a passenger who found himself on the same flight as the prime minister; a social activist reporting on the court proceedings of a salary dispute pitting an employee (who he was assisting) against an employer.
