#jay rosen

Citizen Journalism: Sharing What Happened In Texas

Nothing better illustrates the truth of Jay Rosen‘s pronouncement that “the watchdog press is dead” than the events on the evening of Tuesday, June 25th, in the Texas State Senate.  The Republican majority planned to push though the anti-abortion Senate Bill No. 5. While CNN considered baked goods, the reportage from Texas was accomplished by citizen journalists, and global distribution was…

Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World    [trailer]

Documentary that explores the promise of open source investigation, taking viewers inside the world of the "citizen investigative journalist" collective known as Bellingcat.

Great doc. Usually data freely available on the internet gets used for all kinds of nefarious purposes. So it's good to see that it can also be used for good.

The fight against disinformation feels like a fight against windmills. But these guys are doing a great job. And even better, they are teaching others to use the same tools.

Jay Rosen’s take on the problems of news journalism since the 80s is so damn valid and crucial. 

“There is a larger problem with where journalists stand in relationship to power and the public, and this is that most American journalists have been trained to think that they stand nowhere.

All traditional media organizations forbid political activism and campaign contributions among news staff, and some news reporters abstain even from voting.

Until recently, legacy media held that journalists should not write about the struggles of their own social groups—

that African American reporters shouldn’t write about civil rights, LGBT people shouldn’t write about the LGBT movement, and disabled people shouldn’t cover disability issues.

(And basically, yes, straight white men should write about everything, which was indeed largely the case for most of journalism history.)

Rosen has criticized this conceit as the “view from nowhere.”

The habit is so strong that many, indeed probably most, traditionally trained journalists— though they do in fact have political views—

would have trouble writing a story or crafting a radio report in a way that reflected a view from where they actually stand. 

This culture, perhaps even more than the institutional inertia of old media behemoths, helps explain why podcasts have been able to adopt an estranged view of Trumpism while more traditional media have struggled:

"A newspaper editor — Chris Quinn of the Cleveland Plain Dealer — says it as clearly as he can: "Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren’t two sides to facts." https://cleveland.com/news/2024/03/our-trump-reporting-upsets-some-readers-but-there-arent-two-sides-to-facts-letter-from-the-editor.html… Quinn writes of a different kind of access. Access to our own eyes and ears:"