“News Quality Differences in Online Newspaper and Citizen Journalism Sites” by Serena Carpenter

Serena Carpenter looks to compare the “quality of news” as presented by online newspaper sites – mainstream journalists – and citizen journalism sites. The article hits some great points, noting that mainstream journalists use more sources, citizen journalists are more concerned with local news, mainstream journalists present a variety of viewpoints, while citizen journalists typically have strong perspectives that usually come through in the news they produce.

But is it even possible to define “quality of news”? News quality should be defined according to the ideals of the institution it is designed to protect: democracy.

Let’s consider capitalism. The mainstream news industry is a monopolistic monster that dominated the airwaves and controls the public discourse by regulating the flow and form of information entering the public sphere. In our neoliberalist era, citizen journalism can represent a form of free enterprise, an entrepreneurial frontier to reclaim the news and put it back in the hands of the individual citizen – it can be the clearest realization of freedom of the press, and in fact, is a return to origin.

Citizen journalism is just like the “penny press” of old – pure journalism, without all the pretention of professional journalism’s principles and norms that are really only in place to maintain profitability in an overly corporatized social institution. It’s important to remember that journalism is a social institution.

And since it is, it only makes sense that it is returned to the hands of the citizens. This is a capitalistic economy – those citizen journalists, regardless of the quality of news as judged next to the broken mainstream institution, who have the ability (whether it be their writing, their particular point of view, their resources or their presentation) to engage and captivate the widest audience will be the most successful. And they will do so their own way, with an entrepreneurial spirit and maybe without even thinking about it, with the purity of democracy as it was originally intended to exist.