I’m not sure if you have been following Dan Gillmor’s exploits lately. He’s garnered a few blog posts about his decision to start a new Facebook account to deal with the site’s new privacy policy. One activity, however, I hadn’t hear about until I did a little Googling myself today was his plan to resurrect his old blog and most of the posts made on his former citizen journalism site Bayosphere.com.
This is a great idea because not only has Gillmor been prophetic about the future of the Internet, but he’s also been surprisingly candid about the weird animal that is citizen journalism. I found his new old blog because I was searching for the open letter he wrote to Bayosphere contributors and readers about why we was ending the site. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been mulling over in my mind why citizen journalism ventures haven’t been more successful, and really I think it has to do with how the news media define success. In fact, I think most news sites that ask for user-generated content operate under what I call the citizen journalism fallacy:
If you build it, they will come in droves and they’ll read every story.
I know it’s long and not really catchy, but it works. Gillmor, along with many others have already shown the first part (if you build it, they will come) is not true. One of the reasons Gillmor said he ended Bayosphere was he just didn’t spend enough time working with the audience to encourage them to contribute. He snagged the line from Field of Dreams to describe why his site didn’t have more contributions. He mistakenly thought starting the site and bookending it with his columns would be enough.
Leonard Witt echoes this idea with a quote from Robin Sloan, co-author of EPIC 2014.
“If you build it, they will not necessarily come. We have, a number of times, assumed that if we built the Web architecture for citizen journalists to send in their reports, they just would.”
Even though it has been discussed ad naseum, I don’t think the media get it. Too many of them build sites and just expect their audience is chomping at the bit to contribute. Even some of the more successful ones don’t do enough to encourage submissions or shepherd them along. CNN and even CurrenTV think it’s enough of an honor be be featured on their stations sometimes.
I wrote a couple weeks about my Google Analytics dilemma. I love having the information about who visits my site and how often, but I’m also tormented knowing I’m reaching so few. Part of me wants to tweak my posts and headlines so they include only the best search terms. Another part wants to remain true to my vision of journalism and this blog. I still haven’t reconciled those parts.
One of the reasons they don’t work harder for submissions is the second part of the fallacy, “the masses that come will read every story.”
I see this especially on iReport. It’s not necessarily that iReport is forcing me to read every story, but it seems the site features its superstars and its “i” and “On CNN” logos so prominently that it diminishes the value of other submissions. Maybe I want to read a little article about a rock harpist (I couldn’t find it on iReport, but this was a story one of my students submitted). There needs to be a way to find it, and iReport doesn’t even have a search feature that I can see. The one on top searches all of CNN.com.
This was one of the growing pains at MyMissourian.com. When we started the site, we thought the great submissions we received by sending teams of students into the community would generate large, perhaps even mass audiences. What we found, however, is that the more we tried to find articles that appealed to the masses, the fewer submissions we received. The more liberal we were in what we accepted, even if we thought only three or four interested people would read it, the more submissions we received and the more surprised we were by the readership numbers.
What I think media organizations that start user-generated content ventures should strive for is an open policy that prejudices no one, but provides help and encouragement to all. It should all of the journalistic resources at its disposal to organize submissions and make them easy to find. It should also draw upon the power of SEO, tags, and keywords to ensure readers can find articles by like-minded folks. Above all, it shouldn’t look at page views on single items. In fact, I don’t even think total page views are as important as the number of connections that are being made. By connections, I don’t just mean links on blogs, diggs, in tweets or status updates (which I think few news organizations count or make available to advertisers). I mean the readers who are using your site to make friends and do things, who are turning to you as a gateway to information and utility.
I’m guessing those kinds of connections would be hard to quantify, but I’m determined to approach an answer with my research. I really think that social psychological concepts such as self-efficacy and self-determination can really help us understand how to get people talking and contributing. But I know I’m victim to the same fallacies sometimes too. I think with the right application of theory, we can make everyone a contributor, when in reality, most people will only contribute in a narrow range of topics or in a specific time frame when they’ve gotten their dander up, for instance. However, I think research can help identify those criteria and in the end help the news media find the people who really have something to add to the conversation.
Either way, I’m glad Gillmor is trying to find all his old blog posts again. I’m sure they’re not all gems, but he has already succeeded in inspiring me. Maybe he’ll have that effect on a few others.
But I have realized that this dilemma is not unique to me and my blog. As I think about the citizen journalism projects in which I’ve participated and researched, the people behind them have probably wrestled with a similar head scratcher. Over the last couple of days, I’ve pieced together the following statement that I call the citizen journalism fallacy: If you build it, they will come and they’ll read every story. Dan Gillmor has made it clear why the first part of that statement is false.
Photo Credit: Clyde Bentley from AEJMC 2004. Was it really that long ago?
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Great post, Hans. I’d like to know more about readership at other sites. We know at MyMissourian that our readership is low, but we live in such an over-covered town. Anyone who has a story to tell here is probably being interviewed by a J2100 student!
Thanks Joy. I’m glad you commented because in the rough draft (in my head) of that post, I included a section about the great things you’ve done at MyMissourian since you’ve taken over. I don’t know if you have any hard numbers, but I would bet the simple things you have done, such as standardize post formats and include author information on the top, have increased the number of submissions. You make a good case for what I believe the role editors should fulfill on a citizen journalism site.