Separation Of Powers?
By Neil Dodds
31 January, 2006
Britain's powerful National Union of Journalists has just issued a series of guidelines aimed at regulation the use of citizen journalists - or what it calls "witness contributors" in the mainstream media.
The code of conduct has come in for severe criticism, not least from the editor of the Guardian's online edition, Emily Bell, who warns that implementing the code could "tie the hands of those who employ journalists to the benefit of those who do not."
Neil McIntosh goes further on his blog, describing the code as "witless" and arguing that it is protectionist, expensive and dangerously vague. The NUJ team behind the guidelines are journalists themselves, he says, and experienced negotiators at that: One can't help wondering if "they deliberately set out to kill user generated content with this code, or was it just an inability to grasp the issues involved that led them down this path?"
For Bell's part, the main problem with the code is that the people behind it have no idea about how the digital media operates:
"The problem, as with the NUJ and many organisations in transition between an old and new world, is that the decision-makers almost never have first-hand experience of what they are trying to codify or regulate. Understanding of internet development and the pressure it puts on traditional business is often so poor that it borders on a type of illiteracy. One cannot imagine a car manufacturer with a board on which no one has experience of a production line, or a hospital whose clinical board has no doctors. "
(...)
"If the Canutes who wish the internet had never happened looked around, they would see dozens of services offering words and pictures on all manner of topics without a single professional or paid-for contribution, none of them traditional media organisations. It does not mean those of us working in new media should never engage our brains, or that quality of output should be sacrificed for quantity, but one can work in a world where readers answer back, and include them in a conversation without making it a subject of bizarre demarcation. Most of us should know enough by now to hold up our hands and say we know almost nothing about the future of the media and how it will develop. What is worrying is that those who know least seem determined to exercise impossible certainty."
The NUJ's code of conduct comes as the debate over the role of professional and amateur (or citizen) journalists gathers pace. Jack Shafer in Slate.com argues that technological change in the media has always washed away vested interests, be they obstructive unions or just media professionals who believe that "their job is somehow their "property," and that no amateur can step in to perform their difficult and arduous tasks."
Too many news sites are competing for too few eyeballs. Newspapers have to get better to compete with both the best bloggers, and the worst, who, thanks to the principle of the Long Tail, attract enough readers to keep even the nichest of niche sites running.
What sort of financial model will work for this kind of media? No-one knows yet where the billions of dollars of advertising revenue for minor-site ads will end up, though Google looks likely to cream off much of the loot. There's a good round-up of current thinking from Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0.
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