Snow: Citizen media only a threat to bad journalism

Posted by Martin Stabe on 27 March 2006 at 11:10
Tags: Citizen journalism, Guardian, ITN, Journalism

Jon Snow says user-generated content is democratising journalism and will help “professionalise professional media”.

The Channel 4 presenter was speaking on a panel about user-generated content at the Guardian’s Changing Media Summit. Also on the panel were Guardian Unlimited editor Emily Bell, Virgin Radio chief executive Fru Hazlitt, and blogger Ben Hammersley, who led development of the Guardian’s new blog Comment is free.

“I have no problem with it at all. I see it as a completly liberating formula,” said Snow, who described the many tips he was getting from the hundreds of e-mails he recieves every day, such as low-level Whitehall officials who had leaked details of suspect peerages. He described viewers’ reponses as “golddust flying our way” with the biggest problem being how to sort theough the volume of information being supplied.

Facilitating feedback and transparency has helped democratise journalism, Snow argued: “You begin to look back on what you were doing and you think it was so undemocratic, it was so unresponseive, it was so arrogant.”

Journalism, he argued, can no longer be one-way street, he said, adding that there are still too many columnists who fail to supply their e-mail addresses at the foot of their pieces.

Snow also suggested that citizen journalism would force professional journalists to raise their standards.

Snow said that “much professional journalism was not very professional to begin with”, and that citizen journalists would help to “professionalise professional journalism” by exposing unprofessional media practices.

“There are a whole lot of people who entered journalism 25 years ago that no longer will be there,” he said. The endemic alcoholism of Fleet Street, he said, would no longer be acceptable today.

The only people who should feel threatened by citizen media are mediocre professionals, agreed Hammersly.

Describing the early experience of Comment is Free, Hammersley said: “A lot of the user generated content is almost as good as the lower end of the professional comment. If you’re not very good, you’re kind of screwed, because if otherwise the audience is better than you.

Editors would soon begin questioning the high salaries of columnists who offer material no better than what some of the best bloggers are offering, Hammersley predicted.