Citizen journalism

A blogger is a one-woman band: author, photographer, videographer, cartographer, designer, publisher, advertising exec, marketing guru, legal department, etc. That's the pain of the genre – but the beauty too. You're the boss: free to flourish and flounder both without a lot of hoop-jumping.

 

The title "citizen journalist" increasingly applies to people paddling in the datastream like this. This elastic term stretches from reader-comment sidebars to pro-curated sites of user-generated content and blogs writ so large they rival the mainstream media. Take FiveThirtyEight: A site run by a baseball-stats nerd, a poker player, and a documentary filmmaker has a readership akin to the Houston Chronicle's, according to Joshua Benton at Harvard's Neiman Journalism Lab.

Media's converging online in a swirl. Text rubs shoulders with broadcast video now. Bloggers turn pro and pros crowd-source. Indie media is the future, insists pundit Mark Cooper. "It is the independent, citizen and community media that provide the seeds of an alternative journalism, he claims in The Huffington Post. "These alternatives tend to be structured viral communications, in which a light touch of hierarchy can go a long way. The examples are well known, beyond blogging, which tends to be the least organized form of expression. We find things like Wikis, online posts, collaborative production and distribution in peer-to-peer networks, opens source software, crowd sourcing, and new forms of copyright, like the Creative Commons, etc.

"The critical challenge for these outlets is to become trusted intermediaries. The critical challenge for society is to figure out how to tap into the immense energy of the public sphere in cyberspace while preserving key journalistic attributes someplace within a much-expanded public sphere. To build trust, the new journalism will have to produce a steady stream of output that readers find authoritative, correct and useful."

Digging down: creating distinctive, original content

Chris Pirillo argues that bloggers should say something original at least once a day in this terrific advice post. "Create, don’t regurgitate," he urges. "Make yourself uncomfortable."

Developer Jeff Atwood makes some similar points on Coding Horror: “Switch things up. Seek out uncommon sites with unique information. Dig down to original sources and read the material everyone is commenting endlessly on.”

The key word there – the takeaway message – should be sources. You need 'em. Anchor your blog in the wider world of facts and reflections. Citing experts (or even Joe Public) lends scope and authority to your work: it's no longer the sound of one hand clapping, but part of a larger dialogue. And building a community is what the web's all about.

Musing about you're eyeglasses, for example? Dorothy Parker got there first. By alluding to her famous line, you're evoking information deep in the readers' memories, which helps them connect to your material and retain it better. WIN! Or dig even deeper and find a great spectacle quote that hasn't been hounded into the land of cliché. DOUBLE WIN! Or perhaps link to another blogger's exploration of the topic. BONUS OVERTIME GOODNESS!

Articles, blogs, books and quotation compilations are great tools. But you can take it further: talk to people.

Get your interview on

As Metascene explained in Ten Tips for Building a Bionic Weblog: "Play reporter once in a while. Research under-reported stories and do some leg work for your readers. Find an angle that no one, including mainstream press, has reported on."

Don't be shy about interviewing. Most folks love to discuss their passions – and will treat a citizen journalist with the same respect as a professional (so expect anything from fawning to projectiles ... but mostly gracious help).

Great places to harvest interviewees include Twitter, Facebook and Help A Reporter Out, as well as listserves and electronic bulletin boards.

Research beforehand to formulate intelligent questions. Jot down key queries, so they don't slip away during a good conversation. Avoid questions with a simple yes or no answer; Try to get subjects to elaborate. Remember to listen, not talk, advises Christopher (Chip) Scanlan, author of Reporting and Writing: Basics for the 21st Century.

Start with easy, confidence-building queries, then weave in tougher material – if any – towards the end. Always conclude with: “Is there anything you'd like to add that we haven't covered?” and “What elements would you emphasize in an article?” Often the best comments arise then.

In most countries, you must ask permission to capture the conversation on audio or video tape (record the subject's assent for maximum protection, though clip that off any broadcasts). I take notes too, because technology can easily fail. For example, Oxford Times Features Writer Reg Little once interviewed a haughty Noble Prize laureate, only to discover the recorder was on the wrong setting. The two-hour conversation was captured on high speed –  creating a super-soprano, chittering, Alvin and the Chipmunks effect. Poor Reg spent long, long hours interpreting the tinny squeal. Background noise, battery failure and tampering can also ruin recordings.

“Off the record” means the subject is imparting sensitive background information not for print. Strictly speaking, they must specify this before the statement, but use your discretion. “Not for attribution” means you cannot use that person's name, just a vague description like “a Johannesburg shopkeeper” or “a Syrian homemaker”. Avoid this whenever possible, as it weakens your credibility.

News format: all hail the inverted pyramid

News stories traditionally begin with the most important details, tapering to less critical ones towards the end. This inverted pyramid format “organizes stories not around ideas or chronologies but around facts,” explained New York University Journalism Professor Mitchell Stephens in A History of News. “It weighs and shuffles the various pieces of information, focusing with remarkable single-mindedness on their relative news value.”

Some historians link the style's birth to the expense of the telegraph. Flowery nineteenth-century language fell by the wayside, as Civil War stories clicked across the country at a penny a character. Wire services inspired brisk impartial news, bulletins useful to all papers, regardless of their political persuasion. As Columbia University's Professor James Carey observed: “It eliminated the letter-writing correspondent, who announced an event and described it in rich detail as well as analyzing its substance, and replaced him with a stringer who supplied the bare facts.”

The inverted pyramid was crucial in the days before digital design. Typesetters laid down columns of text. When the space ran out, the article ended with a decisive swipe of the exacto knife. Yet newspapers still employ the technique, especially for hard news. It survives for good reason, according to Christopher 'Chip' Scanlan, director of the National Writers Workshops. “Many readers are impatient and want stories to get to the point immediately. In fast-breaking news situations … the pyramid allows the news writer to rewrite the top of the story continually, keeping it up-to-date,” he observed on the Poynter Institute's website, where the senior faculty member is a columnist. “It's also an extremely useful tool for thinking and organizing because it forces the reporter to sum up the point of the story in a single paragraph.”

That chunk of text is traditionally called a “nut graf”: this passage showcases an article's essence and traditionally follows the lede, the introductory hook. Ken Wells, a writer and editor at The Wall Street Journal, described it as “a paragraph that says what this whole story is about and why you should read it. It's a flag to the reader, high up in the story: You can decide to proceed or not, but if you read no farther, you know what that story's about.”

To encourage traffic from search engines, try to place key nut graf details in the first 25 words, displayed when people search on a topic. The more stylish and information-dense you make that introduction, the more audience you're likely to attract.

Work all the angles, especially timely ones

As you consider topics, ask this question: why is this post by you is noteworthy now? Journalists call these characteristics an “angle”. This broad term ranges from recounting an extraordinary experience to exploring a current controversy or revisiting a historical landmark.

Any time readers can connect new information to data in "deep storage," it boosts their rate of retention. So think about how to grab their attention with fresh angles, then seal your screeds in their minds with context.

A blockbuster – or bestseller – highlights a place or subject; people fall in love with the scenery, as well as the story (remember how tourists flocked to New Zealand, as the Fellowship of the Ring trilogy unfolded?). Seek out the new ... or exhibitions and festivals for a timely twist. Writers also mark the anniversaries of events: for example, numerous journalists and bloggers retraced the route of Lewis and Clark a century after their epic trek across North America.

Remember also that you can play off news items, linking to original sources. Do you suffer from the same acoustic trauma that might be pushing whales to beach? How can readers make peanut butter at home, following the latest health scare? Are proposed four-day work weeks a blessing or a curse?

Capitalize on current headlines. Vancouver, for example, is a hot topic before the Olympic Games of 2010. Indonesia remained on the radar long after the tsunami wreckage was cleared. As architects haggled over the World Trade Center site redesign, attention focused on New York City.

Riffing off news sources is a powerful, powerful tool. But make sure you give credit where it's due. Cite the original story – its source and ideally its author – with links where possible. This respects the hard work of other writers and allows intrigued readers to follow through, exploring a topic more deeply.

Quotes add great texture to a post. If you're "data-mining" them from an article or book, be extra careful to note this (both in collegial spirit, but also as protection against libel and copyright infringement). Media law's complex, but broadly speaking, never lift more than 25 consecutive words from another's text without permission. You can, however, paraphrase and link.