South Africa

I have watched the birth of our own citizen based internet “newspaper” (Reporter.co.za) with a lot of interest. Anything that boosts grassroots participation in the media in an age where access to information is paramount can only be a good thing. However a number of concerns come attached with this form of “journalism”. Having watched the evolution of the trendsetter in this area, (OhMyNews in Korea) I have seen how this form of news can be both help and a hindrance in effectively providing reliable and unbiased news to the public.

Probably the most positive aspect of this form of Media is that it is extremely inclusive and allows basically anyone with a good story to tell and an internet connection to become a “reporter”. This vastly increases the amount of information available on a variety of topics and lets people who are typically overlooked by the mainstream media contribute to what is the news of the day. But it is not so much the positive aspects of this reporting that concern me, it is the “Trojan” features of it that worry me.

I have seen this happen in OhMyNews and I noticed the first example of it today in our Reporter.co.za. As has been written in a lot of articles about this form of media, ultimately the quality of these “newspapers” (as in traditional media) depend on the quality of the editorial staff who have to view thousands of what are essentially “Letters to the Editor”. Now for whatever reason sometimes stories slip through that are blatantly biased or written in a manner designed to promote a certain agenda. Such a charge has been leveled against at OhMyNews for its “coverage” of the election of the most recent Korean President or the anti-American sentiments that gripped the peninsula in 2002. With “citizen reporters” the writers were not placing their credibility at stake each time they put pen to paper (admittedly this has changed with some “reporters” became regular contributors) unlike regular journalists. The contributors are not trained journalists, who are held up to a certain standard of reporting by their peers and readers.  The fact of the matter was that screening by editors was basically the only barrier between the contributor and the publishing of articles. Editors didn’t have the time to check out or verify each and every story or the background of the contributors and mistakes have crept in.

This brings me round to what I read today on Reporter.co.za. Take a look at this story. Reads like a press-release doesn’t it, saying all the right things about how great reasonable SASCO is? Well now look who wrote it. According to the SASCO website Floyd Shivambu is a “leading member” of SASCO – but reading the article you would never realize that, in fact you’d probably think it was just contributed by some member of Joe Public. It is placed in the news section of the site, giving it a sheen of real news credibility and the false impression of real independent “news”, when in fact it isn’t – it’s basically a SASCO press release. This is what I mean by “Trojan” journalism – people writing and contributing articles not with the intention of informing but rather to advance their own agenda…

We’ll have to see how Reporter.co.za develops.