Inherent Authority
Citizens and the content they produce have a sufficient amount of inherent authority to fill the roles they occupy. For international reporting in times of turmoil, citizen media-contributors are typically eyewitnesses who can provide detailed information, or even photographs and video, of events. But for the skeptics who cannot fully trust user-produced media, there are methods available for using even questionable citizen journalism, as noted by Rune Saugmann Andersen of the University of Copenhagen. Andersen presents four strategies – illustration, rumoring, sourcing, and authorization – for professionals to trust citizen journalism, ranging in their levels of attributing authority to citizen journalistic content (324-325). As these strategies show, even when it comes to civilian content of questionable authority, there are ways for citizen journalism to play out important roles in turmoil reporting.
|
|
Illustration, Andersen explains, is a media strategy that involves using content as a demonstration of news that has already been confirmed. In turmoil reporting, this method is often employed when mainstream media outlets use bits of citizen journalism, like the example I presented above of eyewitness tweets in Newsweek’s Twitter Timeline, to illustrate pre-established major events (Andersen 325; Zuckerman 66). Professionals often present textual civilian content through this method, because it is not necessary to attribute a significant amount of authorization to content that is unconfirmed, such as a tweet.
|
Andersen’s next strategy, rumoring, is one in which professional journalists use content but explicitly acknowledge its dubiousness. This allows mainstream media to base some of their content on questionable citizen journalism, while maintaining a sense of skepticism on its believability (Andersen 326).
|
The third strategy, sourcing, is one that, Andersen says, uses content but does not express explicit doubt about its truthfulness, while at the same time referencing some information about the authority or bias of the source. Often, this could mean denoting the source’s affiliation or position; in the case of international turmoil reporting, this would mean quoting the content’s source, or the site or social media network like Facebook or Twitter, from which it was retrieved (Andersen 329).
|
Andersen’s final strategy, authorization, is the highest level of affording believability to content. In this strategy, media such as user-generated content is interwoven seamlessly with professional content. This strategy, while occasionally used for citizen journalistic content from reputable websites, is most commonly used for visual content in the form of images or video (Andersen 331). Visual content has what Andersen calls “inherent credibility” (322); Matt Carlson attests that photographs cannot truly be biased and are merely “objective traces of reality” (qtd. in Andersen 322).
|
Community blogs also have sufficient authority to maintain the credibility needed to function in their journalistic roles. Authority is typically unattainable to individual bloggers because they operate alone and are not established media outlets. Community blogs, however, are not so. Community blogs are organizations of citizen journalists who work together and contribute to one another to create what I previously noted as a feeling of community and camaraderie. Further, these blogs fill a gap in the mainstream media by providing hyperlocal news (Fanselow 24). These attributes grant community blogs the three sources of authority identified by Max Weber, quoted by Bock: rational, traditional, and charismatic (641). Community blogs have rational authority, or authority from law or social sanction, because they are well established and organized. Community blogs also have traditional authority, or authority from established social beliefs, because once the mainstream media no longer focuses on a given neighborhood, the community blogs are the only news source left, consequently becoming the accepted norm. Charismatic authority, or authority based on the actions of an individual, are left up to the skill of the citizen journalists, and skill is easily attainable. So, as proven, authority is also achievable by community blogs, allowing them to fulfill their role of supplying hyperlocal news.