Neha-Tamara Patel
This week The Guardian opened up its news lists in an experiment in citizen journalism. The paper’s website calls for readers to ‘help shape the Guardian’s news coverage by talking to editors and reporters about upcoming stories as [they] work on them’. Readers are requested to offer their thoughts and feedback through twitter following the hash-tag #opennews. The Guardian then selectively re-tweet comments on their news list page: http://bit.ly/o3gOAh
My initial thoughts were skeptical; the comment feature on the news list page is closed, thus not offering the usual channel for web readers to leave feedback. Further more, the use of twitter is pivotal to their whole experiment – it seems social media is becoming the fastest growing channel for news and interaction, and the Guardian are keen to make use of this trend. For those who don’t have twitter yet but want to participate, the team do stress that readers may directly email the journalists working on stories, but that emails are ‘less likely to be spotted than a tweet.’ Email – the medium considered the fastest and most efficient form of communication may no longer be fast enough.
It appears that after a few days of being live, the news lists are going well, indeed some people may be taking citizen journalism a step too far; News editor Dan Roberts, who is running the experiment, tweeted today:
RobertsDan: some people might be taking #opennews a little literally. An NHS trust says someone impersonating guardian reporter tried citizen’s arrest!
Perhaps an extreme response to citizen journalism, but the Guardian should be credited for trying to get their readers involved in what their writing – surely that’s one of the main points of journalism: identifying what readers want to read?
There are some draw backs to the news lists however; although items on the lists cover UK news, International news and business and economics, there are mainly scheduled items on the lists, meaning that there is a limit to the amount of interaction that can take place – many of the items don’t really allow for commenting on the news itself. It seems there is a dichotomy in the purposes behind the lists, are they there for shaping the news, or are they there in attempt to make the Guardian’s news coverage more transparent?
One of the other issues I had with the site is that their #opennews twitter feed onsite does not seems to be regularly updated, with the majority of the comments being from Guardian journalists – there is a slight lack in the representation of the voice of the people in this citizen journalism experiment.
Although I have identified some of the problems that I found with the Guardian news lists, I still think it is important to point out that despite its flaws, the Guardian are making a step in the right direction, at a time when citizen journalism is becoming increasingly important. Newspaper readers like to feel some involvement in the news they read, and although not perfect, the Guardian is offering an opportunity that all other news platforms are not – accessibility and proximity to their newsroom.