For academics studying whether “citizen journalism” is going to “replace” traditional journalism, let me save you some time: It won’t. It’s not trying to. It shouldn’t.
Journalism is not, never has been and should not become a zero-sum game.
A study by a team of five university researchers showed a fairly common old-media bias in comparing citizen media sites to traditional media in 46 metro areas. The title of a report on the study by Missouri School of Journalism researchers Margaret Duffy, Esther Thorson and Mi Jahng describes the flawed premise: “Comparing Legacy News Sites with Citizen News and Blog Sites: Where’s the Best Journalism?“
(That report was presented at an academic conference but has not been published and is not available online, so the link above goes to an MU News Bureau story on the study. A report on an earlier phase of the study is embedded below. Thanks to Duffy for sending me copies of both. Her response to my criticism is at the end of this post.) The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism cited the study at length in its State of the News Media report.
Like a study of Baltimore media released earlier this year by PEJ, this study tried to measure new media by old media’s yardstick. Guess how that one’s going to come out every time.
It did this time, too. “Citizen sites – even the best – are far from able to replace or significantly supplement legacy news,” the study concluded. “Many offer excellent content and serve their communities in important ways. But without the content of legacy news sites, no city would have comparable coverage.”
I don’t want to pick this study apart point by point, as I did with the Baltimore study. I will, though, point out three significant problems:
- Like any academic study of new media, this one was outdated as soon as it was released. By studying only “citizen” sites, the study does not reflect one of the most important developments in media currently: the launch this year and last of professional news sites such as Bay Citizen, Civil Beat and California Watch (of course, TBD has not launched yet, so we couldn’t be included either). Even if you accept the premise of the study (more later on why that is so flawed), the current question would not be whether citizen journalism would replace legacy media, but whether some combination of citizen journalists and new professional organizations would replace the old media. This is not a failing of the research itself, but the report should have noted this huge development in community media.
- Like the Baltimore study, this one pays no attention to citizens using Twitter, a news source that is too significant to ignore. This study does not mention Twitter in either of two reports sent to me by Duffy. The report faults citizen web sites that failed to post daily, noting that the traditional media are more “timely.” Well, if timeliness is important and you ignore a citizen media source that is consistently more timely than traditional media, you have tipped the scale heavily in favor of the old guys.
- Most important (beyond the bogus premise), the study actually looked at more traditional media outlets in the 46 metro areas studied than it did citizen sites. Compare a professional news staff of several dozen with a guy blogging in his spare time, or even a handful of people blogging in their spare time, and the large staff wins, even if it’s been slashed by multiple rounds of buyouts and layoffs. In the 46 media markets chosen for the study, the researchers examined the performance of 187 legacy media sites and 152 citizen news sites and citizen blogs. The contribution of blogs and citizen journalists to the news ecosystem (a phrase the Baltimore study used that I like, even if they didn’t understand it) cannot be understood by examining three or four blogs. We have 96 blogs and news sites already signed up for the TBD Community Network, and we still have our sights set on dozens more. To measure what citizen journalism is doing in the Washington area, you need to study dozens, if not hundreds, of sites and blogs. Especially if you’re studying whether citizens could “replace” old media, you need to look at the full citizen effort. The cliché of bad comparisons is that you’re comparing apples to oranges. This is more like comparing an apple to a grape. A grape will never replace an apple. But a bunch of grapes might provide similar or more nutrition, even if one makes a better pie and the other better wine. These researchers didn’t study the full bunch of grapes that exists in every metro area.
But let’s return to the flawed premise. Jay Rosen calls people discussing and studying this notion “replaceniks.” This is a backward-looking way of studying a forward-looking change in the media. You can simply never produce meaningful data with such a study.
The replacenik premise (though it’s not stated this explicitly) is that the old way was a paragon of democracy that must be retained or replaced untouched or we will fall into chaos. But the truth is that media have always been evolving and have never been perfect.
The early partisan press had none of the investigative reporting of Ida Tarbell, Woodward and Bernstein or Barlett and Steele. Journalism’s most prestigious prize is named for Joseph Pulitzer, whose name during his life was synonymous with yellow journalism. The other giant of yellow journalism, William Randolph Hearst (a major media company still bears his name), helped fuel our nation’s lust for a war with Spain (Duffy noted correctly in her email that recent scholarship debunks a piece of the Hearst legend surrounding the war, but the hysteria of the New York papers leading up to the war is a matter of historical fact.) Speaking of wars, the faulty reporting of virtually all the major national media except the Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau helped lead us into a war in Iraq that we still can’t get out of.
The business media was not a good enough watchdog to prevent or provide much warning of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the Enron mirage of the 1990s (which collapsed in 2001) or the mortgage mayhem of the past decade.
And at the local level, I am quite sure that as many, if not more, local government meetings and expenditures are not covered by the media as are covered.
With notable and courageous exceptions, the media have been as racist, sexist and materialistic through history as the society they covered.
Why in the world would it be important to replace media that give far more attention to the achievements of high school athletes than to the achievements of students and the academic problems of schools?
Media perform an important role in society but we have always performed it imperfectly. And don’t tell me that the boom in newsroom employment in the 1980s was all dedicated to hiring watchdogs. I worked in newsrooms that whole time. We performed the watchdog role and took it seriously, but we also missed scandals and malfeasance at all levels and covered a lot of trivial and boring news.
I am proud of most of the contributions my news organizations made for their communities and of many times we exposed wrongdoing and stood up to the powerful. But I also know that an archbishop called a publisher and killed a story I had written, with four kinds of verification, about a priest who had sexually abused a girl. I documented offenses by a religious cult including sexual abuse of a child and encouraging members to commit tax fraud. But that story never ran because I took another job shortly after finishing it and an editor lacked the spine to stand behind the story if I wasn’t there to take the heat. Nearly every journalist who has worked as long as I have can tell similar discouraging stories. This is a media we should seek to eclipse, not replace.
I don’t know what citizen journalism or professional new media will become, but I know we are seeing a media renaissance whose value should not be measured against imperfect media who have consistently refused to innovate.
These studies miss the point as badly as if you were to study whether NASCAR will replace horse racing. One kind or racing is declining and another is rising, but no one is replacing anyone here. The media revolution we are experiencing and witnessing isn’t like trying to replace an old quarterback by sending in a younger one (a story most traditional media would give more coverage than your average watchdog story).
I hope someone does some valid studies of new media and the roles they are playing. But don’t measure the future against the past.
Disclosure: I have been accepted to online graduate studies at the University of Missouri, where three of the five researchers on this project are based. I registered for my first course for last spring, but withdrew when I accepted my job at TBD. I am not sure when or whether I will take any graduate classes there.
Admission: On rereading, I notice that I have gone on a metaphor spree here: auto and horse racing, quarterbacks, fruit, watchdogs, a yardstick. Each of them makes the point I wanted to make, though, and I decided to poke fun at this weakness in my writing because I don’t have time to fix it today. I’ll just point you to the news-business metaphor collection Nick Bergus is compiling (at my suggestion, ironically enough). It’s so much easier to recognize my weaknesses in the writing of others.
Thanks to Margaret Duffy, one of the authors of the report, for answering some questions I emailed her, and for this response to a draft I sent with the questions:
I’m on another deadline and Esther’s in London so I can’t respond point by point. I would make a few quick observations and I speak for myself, not my co-authors:
- Of course, all social scientific studies become dated in dynamic fields. Nevertheless, this was an effort to look at the citizen journalism phenomenon in a systematic and scientific way, not on impressionistic feelings or observations. We wanted to know if the enthusiasm and zeal many had for citizen journalism could be supported by evidence.
- We have no agenda to defend “old media.” Nor do we have any illusions that the old model was/is static or perfect. In fact, in our early exploratory studies we were quite surprised that the citizen and blog efforts were not only quite limited in the coverage they provided but exceedingly ephemeral. We certainly wish citizen sites and new professional sites well and are hopeful that in the future they can be significant contributors to the news environment. As you know, however, it’s harder than it looks to cover the news in meaningful ways. On the dimensions we described, we did not find that depth and breadth of coverage was comparable. Future studies may, indeed, find that the situation has changed. I hope so.
Most of us hope for and expect that the news media (whoever they are) will serve as the Fourth Estate. And, by the way, I’m not so dismissive of community reporting on high school sports because it isn’t fearlessly exposing corruption on the city council. Kids, their schools, local organizations, and all those small events help strengthen our communities and create social capital. Citizen sites can serve a role in that as well.
Buttry note: I don’t dismiss the value of high school sports. I’m a former high school athlete and sports writer. And I agree that citizen sites can — and in some cases already are — fill that role well. But high school sports are not as important to communities and society as schools are, and the media coverage is nowhere near comparable.
Thanks to Margaret for this response. She sent me copies of both reports, but did not give me permission to post the scholars’ second report, which has not been published.
Excellent point about the exclusion of Twitter; it is, indeed, too important to ignore for purposes of community coverage. And I agree with many of your concerns/criticisms of this study. But I have to applaud efforts to try to document and study the fast-changing new media, regardless of its shortcomings.
Re: Your point about “replaceniks”: I would note Margaret Duffy and Esther Thorson are two dedicated scholars who approach their research with an open mind and are not beholden to the journalistic ways of old.
After working in newspapers for 14 years, I went to Mizzou for my doctorate and worked with Margaret and Esther. I urge you to check out their work on the Media Choice Model (http://www.concernedjournalists.org/understanding-needs-states), which delves into why and how audiences choose media to satisfy communication needs. If you look at the breadth of their research, you’ll find it doesn’t fall into the narrow definition of “defending the old way.”
LikeLike
Hi Steve–
I stumbled upon this post from a following a bunch of links from TBD–glad I did….
totally agree with many of your thoughts on this subject. I’ve been blogging–from a non-academic, observer point of view–on the whole “citizen journalism” thing for about 5 years, and always find that the academics are always off on their “studies.” I agree that it’s because they’re looking at it through the legacy media lens–but also that when one chooses to interview subjects, one misses what’s going on among people. Watching what people are doing, what their lives are about, how they use various forms of social media, and asking them about their attitudes re the local paper (not just assuming to know them) might shed a better light on citizens and the news.
Further, I’ve found that the whole idea of “citizen journalism” is something academics wish citizens would become. Not to mention that the term is often used derisively against journalists who are no longer employed by newspapers or tv outlets. So they’re not working in the legacy media news business. Does that make them any less journalists? And as far as ‘citizens’–your average man or woman in the street–is concerned, most don’t have the time to be ‘citizen journalists.’ They barely have time to feed their kids something more than chicken fingers and macaroni and cheese, let alone go out and report the news the way the local paper might. So, academia really needs to re-think it’s whole attitude, and, if it can, change its perspective. But I certainly won’t lose any sleep waiting for that to happen.
LikeLike
Agree with everything you say here, Steve.
One point I’d make based on my observations here: Many of the local citizen bloggers are the ones touting their ability to replace the newspaper, rather than the other way around. (And I am specific in using “newspaper” rather than “traditional media.”)
LikeLike
Thanks for all these thoughtful comments.
Jonathan, I don’t question the dedication or research ability of the scholars. But the title of their report, “Comparing Legacy News Sites with Citizen News and Blog Sites: Where’s the Best Journalism?” and the language of the report, using the words “replace” and “replacement,” frames this research in the replacenik camp.
John, I have heard replacenik thinking from bloggers, but I hear it more from academics and news executives (and people arguing for government subsidies).
LikeLike
Good point. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss some of the other research they’ve done. I find that academics, journalists, and bloggers often look askance at one another, but it seems all three have something to contribute to the future of journalism.
LikeLike
[…] MUITO interessante: Academics measure new media (again) by old-media yardstick. […]
LikeLike
Great post, Steve. I mean, really great post. You’ve been on fire recently.
As I alluded to in a tweet, this study is flawed both in its conception and execution, and Margaret really doesn’t allay that conclusion in her response.
Not to go all ego on this … but when I read things like “But without the content of legacy news sites, no city would have comparable coverage.” I think — obviously, they didn’t look at Batavia.
LikeLike
Thanks, Howard. (I actually was feeling bad about how little I had posted this month, but then obits and this study got me fired up.)
I’m guessing Batavia wasn’t one of the 46 cities studied. But I will publicly suggest it here for the first genuine study of new media in communities (or even for the next replacenik study).
LikeLike
I might also add some scope to the perspective, that many us that are attracting the controversial “citizen journalist” label have multiple professional interests in harvesting, curating, analyzing and promoting dialogue concerning local/regional topics…these interests range from actual contextual advertising or promotion (many of us have business development responsibilities), to research (i.e. crowd-sourced, though focused feedback), to professional profile development (i.e. publishing analysis and commentary as an SME), to local civic duty (i.e. simply support your communities), to entertainment, to plain ‘ol “web logging”, i.e. records for posterity of events and interests. Most of this actually isn’t news or journalism, for news’ sake. But it does add to the semantic richness of online conversation along searchable topics, and affords some real-time dialogue and feedback to further raise awareness or promote the topic. So, perhaps “citizen journalists” shouldn’t be the focus of traditional media despair, but “citizen media”.
LikeLike
I’d submit that some of the replacenik thinking is also a holdover from competitive newspaper days.
Not so long ago, one newspaper had to crush another in order to dominate a market, take the majority of circulation and then take the majority of advertising, thus controlling the rates on that advertising.
“Replaceniks” then were using a business strategy to control supply and demand. The online link economy can change that.
Some perspective, from the Cox vs. New York Times war in Atlanta in the late ’80s and early ’90s:
http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=2058
In that war, journalists eventually lost jobs, communities lost voices and newspaper companies wasted money.
Interesting to note: The bar mentioned in the article remains to this day, and prospers.
LikeLike
Margaret answered a different–and more brainless– argument than the one Steve tried to make. She decided to simply switch the subject under debate to, “you’re anti-blogger and a shill for the MSM, Margaret!!!” and then reply, in a very calm and professional way, to that.
Thus, “We have no agenda to defend ‘old media.’ Nor do we have any illusions that the old model was/is static or perfect.” (In other words: we’re not shills for the MSM.) “We certainly wish citizen sites and new professional sites well…” (Meaning: we’re not against new media.) “On the dimensions we described, we did not find that depth and breadth of coverage was comparable. Future studies may, indeed, find that the situation has changed.” (Meaning: sorry if this hurts anyone’s feelings, but the beef just isn’t there; still, that doesn’t mean it won’t be in the future! See? We’re not against new media.)
The basic idea that “your study is off on the wrong foot if it’s asking about replacement…” did not get through to her, and she did not reply to it. As to why that is, I do not know.
LikeLike
[…] Steve Buttry (who must have had a lot of free time this week) delivered a point-by-point critique of the study, making a couple of salient points: It ignores the recent spate of professional […]
LikeLike
Thanks for the interesting, thought-provoking article. Two points come to mind after reading it. First of all, the better way to study this would have been to ask the question “how well can citizen journalism supplement older, more traditional news sources?” That would be valuable information to know though harder to measure for obvious reasons. Also, it would be interesting to test the veracity of citizen journalism sources to see how they hold up compared to the flawed model we have now, which you pointed out in its failings with regard to the Iraq war, etc..
LikeLike
Just caught up with this interesting commentary by my TBD colleague, Jeff Sonderman, on the same topic: http://bit.ly/9FQikt
LikeLike
[…] Steve Buttry (who must have had a lot of free time this week) delivered a point-by-point critique of the site, making a couple of salient points: The study ignores the recent spate of professional […]
LikeLike
[…] I found this particular blog post (“Academics measure new media (again) by old-media yardstick“) refreshingly […]
LikeLike
[…] Two of my top 10 posts of the year dealt with reports based on research I regarded as flawed: Academics measure new media (again) by old-media yardstick and Old media find comfort in study of Baltimore media (they didn’t look very close). I wrote […]
LikeLike
[…] on the topic last year (Academics measure new media (again) by old-media yardstick), Steve Buttry summed up what many think: For academics studying whether “citizen […]
LikeLike