Mother Jones Article Takes Aim @ Citizen Journalism

Adam Weinstein of Mother Jones, writes, “There’s a place for reader blogs and community participation in the 21st-century newspaper, but let’s not kid ourselves that they are a substitute for what people look for in their morning paper.”

What Weinstein fails to see is that people do not like what they are looking at in their morning paper. Instead of being passive about it, now technology exists that enables them to take control, thus the rise of a new form of journalism - citizen journalism.

The article is a critique at what Weinstein views as the downside to citizen journalism: poorly vetted stories, PR flacks writing stories without disclosing their conflict of interest, and what he calls ‘unqualified hacks’ contributing to the media universe.

Weinstein does not consider the failures of the mainstream media to cover news, nor does he examine the continuous stream of missed opportunities for the media to perform their job and only to have failed miserably in recent year. In fact, citizen journalism is on the rise because it is filling a void that exists in media, and now technology empowers regular people to fill that void. Sure, there are going to be hazards and pitfalls as we transition into this citizen journalism age, there always are when news and technology are in transition. The same people that warned us that the Internet was a fad, that television would never be relevant, and that radio was just a hobby for teenage boys, were always proven wrong.

But then again who is Weinstein to critique citizen journalism in the first place? He is a journalism student and two-time jeopardy champion. Too bad that someone young with such keen writing skills drank the establishment media kool-aid.