About two years later I realize it’s time to revisit my position on citizen journalism and see if I still feel the same way I did when I wrote Citizen Journalism Is Dead.

The one thing we can’t deny is the level of permanence and the extent of infiltration the blogging phenomenon has assumed in the daily lives of so many net users. One of the most common criticisms of my original post was that blogging clearly isn’t dead and that blogging is a form of citizen journalism.

The debate, as far as I can tell, between blogging and journalism seems to have resolved itself: bloggers are publishers, citizen journalism as a category has been subsumed under the banner of either freelance journalism or user-generated content. The mainstream media and bloggers compete occasionally but the key factor when it comes to authority is trust.

The audience may trust particular bloggers on specific topics, but the mainstream media can gain their trust across the board on the basis of effective journalistic processes. In addition, the top bloggers still don’t get close to the readership of some of the large mainstream media sites. Let’s make a short comparison using data from Compete.com:

Now, as you can see, the NYT and Washington Post get substantially more traffic than Engadget, which was the most popular blog on technorati today. One could argue that for a single blog to get as much traffic as these two massive media companies is impressive, and it certainly is but let’s throw myspace into this mix so we can see it all in perspective.

But let’s look at it another way by comparing the technorati 100th most popular blog with the top blog and look at the traffic differential. Interesting, the long tail of blog traffic kicks in very quickly.

So, the bottom line here is that the MSM are still the destination of choice for a massively larger audience. Whether this is really an issue of trust, or simply better brand recognition and marketing budget is irrelevant for this discussion: the simple fact is that the inflammatory arguments about citizen journalism ousting big media has come to nothing in the past two years. Citizen journalism has retreated into a model that the MSM have been using for ages – freelance journalism, and reader participation in the form of comments or contributions.

The problem with the citizen journalism is that it is based on the following argument (more or less):

1. The mainstream media’s role is to promote and supply rational and true information that the public can use in its political decision-making
2. The mainstream media has become partial and economically biased because of its increased commercial imperatives (compare FOX News to public broadcasting in the 1960s)
3. The public still want unbiased truth and rationality
4. The public has access to the events that need reporting on and the means to publish
5. Therefore, the public as a collective can achieve the same ends as the mainstream media in a manner that is ultimately better for the public.

Each and every one of these points is anchored on a theory of objective reality, the truth of which can be known and the notion of rationality as the basis for democracy. This all sounds great except that

1. The “public” is not, and never was, a unified whole. The idea that it was provided the cornerstone of fascism, genocide and oppression.
2. Most mainstream media companies that subscribe to the notion of a rational public also know that trust in their product is largely based on the separation of business and editorial functions in the organization. While this is not carried out in the best of ways all the time, the mistakes are surprisingly rare in the bigger scheme of things.
3. The “public” don’t want rationality and truth, this desire has been eroded by post-modernity (a consequence of the commercial hyper-mediation of nearly every aspect of human life in North America and parts of Europe)
4. The “public” has access to the events covered by the news media in the form of eye-witness accounts in many cases. That’s why the media often interview eyewitnesses. If the sense from the public is that the television news format is too short to tell the real story then maybe they should not support a brand of capitalism that has that impact on the format of the news. Just a thought.
5. The “public” is only going to rally around issues they care about, which means that the notion of “better objectivity” from citizens is by definition impossible.

I do still feel that the promise of citizen journalism, as it was emerging in 2004 in the wake of We The Media, was a false one. It is also becoming clear, however, that elements of the ethos and the practices of citizen journalism are what have made the blogosphere such an exciting and dynamic place and why the mainstream media are increasingly incorporating those voices into their output.