Let's start reading about some of the issues bloggers are facing and debating.
The banner at the top of CNN's public journalism web site iReport.com reads, "See it first. Your Stories. No Boundaries. You won't believe what people are uploading."
Indeed, on Friday morning, boundaries were loose. An iReport story posted by a "Johntw" at around 9 a.m. EDT with the headline "Steve Jobs rushed to ER following severe heart attack" entered the Internet rumor mill, landing on news site Digg.com and spawning dozens of nervous postings on micro-blogging site Twitter.com. By 9:25 am, the widely read online magazine Silicon Alley Insider had picked up the item.
Apple stock dropped with incredible speed on the strength of the rumor. The company's shares fell to $95.41 from $105.27 between 9:40 and 9:52 a.m. - 9 percent - before Apple denied the report. After describing the content as fraudulent, CNN confirmed Friday that a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation is under way in regard to the "citizen blogger" post, which caused a $9 billion loss in Apple shares before the post was debunked. The posting on iReport was "not vetted or reported by CNN journalists," according to a CNN statement.
The Jobs incident was the second time in a week that mainstream media organizations have been embarrassed by their online citizen journalism arms - sparking debate about the accuracy of reports from these Web sites and showing how it takes only a few minutes for a scurrilous rumor, placed on a site without sufficient editorial checks, to inflict damage.
Questionable photos
On Tuesday night, CBS' mobile phone application site, which allows users to upload pictures and video directly to CBSeyemobile.com, published sexually explicit pictures (one of a woman bent over her kitchen stove, her skirt hiked up, according to Ad Age magazine). On Wednesday, both CBS and its advertising partner, Google's AdMobs, which places advertisements next to the Eyemobile videos, issued statements about the incident, with CBS promising to redouble its efforts to police content.
"We've been posting user-generated content since April, and this is the first known incident along these lines," a CBS spokesperson told Ad Age, noting that CBS employs a content moderator. "It was removed promptly and we will redouble our efforts in this regard."
As interactivity and openness have become prized qualities in the new media landscape - and as traditional reporting jobs have been eliminated due to dwindling budgets - print, online and television news organizations have rushed to feature user-generated content. In addition to CBS and CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press have iPhone applications that allow users to submit images.
Over the past year, citizen journalists have been praised for breaking news and providing real-time documentation of major events. Blogger Mayhill Fowler, for instance, contributing to the political citizen journalism project Off the Bus, made headlines when she recorded an April speech by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in which he told a San Francisco audience that "bitter" small-town Americans "cling to guns or religion."
CNN started iReport in August 2006 as part of its online news operation, and initially every submission was vetted by a CNN producer before it appeared online or on television. The "game changer" moment, according to CNN spokeswoman Jennifer Martin, came in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting in April 2007, when the network got cell phone video footage from a student who witnessed the shooting.
Traffic on iReport surged, and CNN decided to make iReport an independent site. CNN employs a moderation company but does not fact-check items - mostly, it is the job of iReport users themselves to weed out erroneous or inappropriate material. Only the submissions that go on the CNN Web site or cable channel are seen by CNN staff. Martin said no changes would be made to iReport because of the Jobs incident.
"It's an extremely important community to us," she said, noting that in September the site received 21,000 submissions.
Quality is always an issue
Depending on dedicated readers to maintain standards has become a fairly common practice on participatory media sites. While mainstream news sites still employ copy editors and professional reporters, many citizen journalism outlets like Helium.com - whose stories are read and ranked by an average of 20 users per post - rely on users to evaluate content.
"I think quality is always an issue," said Helium Vice President Peter Newton, noting that mistakes aren't limited to citizen journalists. "At Helium, one of our biggest differentiators is the quality we provide with the ranking system that we have."
While some media analysts are increasingly finding fault with the new model - such as Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget, who declared that with the Jobs incident, "citizen journalism apparently just failed its first significant test" - public media advocates like New York University journalism Professor Jay Rosen did not see last week's snafus as an indictment of citizen journalism.
Even on the unvetted iReport, it's rare to have posts violate the community standards for accuracy and decency: CNN's Martin said only 0.5 percent of the posted items on iReport - about a hundred - had been removed in September. But Rosen did say filters should be in place if mainstream media is going to successfully allow amateur contributions.
"I think if you are going to put closed and open systems under one brand, then you have to try to organize the open part so that it does not embarrass you," Rosen said in an e-mail. "What the branded news companies cannot do is ... create a low-cost open-gate 'play area,' where the citizens can do their thing and no one carefully watches over it, cultivates it, takes responsibility for building it or for steadily improving the quality of it."
An organization just for legal issues for bloggers. They now offer liability insurance and legal training for bloggers.
Here's an interesting blog that you might be able to use when you write a story on consumers/shopping. You'd need more than this one source, but it's a good prompt.
