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Abstract
Journalism's transition from an industrial age to an information age and the unstable economics of profit-driven newsmaking have allowed for an unprecedented level of citizen input and involvement in the making of news. Here, new relationships between legacy and innovative newsmaking are forged and new models of newsmaking emerge. In this article, we discuss the case of The New Orleans Eye, an attempt at innovative newsmaking rooted in an individual citizen who started blogging in the wake of hurricane Katrina. The New Orleans Eye is a largely foundation-funded, non-profit online news organization composed of bloggers and former ink reporters, and has a unique relationship with the local Fox television station. We treat The New Orleans Eye as an example of a mixed-media system and discuss the tensions that emerge over innovative newsmaking within a context of a profit-driven legacy news industry and a neoliberal state.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank iC&S special issue editor Oscar Westlund and several anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on previous versions of this manuscript. The authors would also like to thank Tulane University students Anna Chang, Jonathan Berman, and Melanie Soilleux for their help transcribing the interview data upon which our analysis is derived. Part of this project was funded by the International Communication Association's 2010 James Carey Urban Communication Award.
Notes
The term ‘legacy media’ refers to the entrenched, dominant, mainstream and largely corporate, often commercialized (i.e., ‘traditional’) media institutions.
Newspapers, magazines and cable news have also engaged in this practice. According to Lasorsa et al. (Citation2012, p. #), ‘ … some news organizations actively encourage their journalists to use Twitter … resulting, at least for some news media outlets, in large audiences. For example, as of March 2011, the New York Times had 2.9 million followers on Twitter; Time had 2.4 million, and CNN had 1.7 million’.
However, because he has not viewed this activity as research-related, he has not taken formal notes about his observations. Nonetheless, this participation has enabled Ostertag to confirm hunches about relationships, track the changing formal relationship between The Eye and Fox News8 and learn about the IRS case. As appropriate, when interviewing members of The Eye, he has asked for additional data about those hunches. Members of the formal Fox News8 news team have not been as cooperative as the bloggers. The station's managing editor has ignored several requests to be interviewed. However, Fox News8 does care about its relationship to The Eye: Its website includes a prominent link to theirs.
At least 27 new blogs in or about New Orleans emerged between 29 August 2005 (the day the hurricane hit New Orleans) and 31 December, 2005. They comprise almost half of the 58 new blogs New Orleans residents created in 2005. Fifty-six additional blogs were created in 2006 and another 66 new blogs in 2007 (Ortiz & Ostertag in progress).
See The Wall Street Journal, 09 August 2007, p. 1.
Bruns (Citation2008, Citation2009) has conceptualized citizen journalists as ‘gatewatchers’ in that they watch the ‘output gates of other sources’ (Bruns Citation2009, p. 5). This change is having implications in the fundamental relationship between newsmakers and consumers, suggesting a revised understanding of newsmaking. For as legacy newsmakers serve as ‘watchdogs’ over sources of information they deem news-worthy, citizen journalists serve as ‘guidedogs’ (Bardoel & Deuze Citation2001), using their online research skills to seek out, uncover and guide others to information that professional newsmakers were either unaware of, downplayed or ignored. These relationships are more commonly found in print journalism. Perhaps because they haven't accumulated the same debt as the ink press, it is difficult to find examples involving local broadcast news organizations.
On by-lines as credit, see Reich and Lahav Citation(2001).
Although many on-line news media claim to be open to ‘user-generated stories’, legacy news media tend to think that user-generated stories are more work to cover than they are worth as news (Hammond et al. Citation2000).