Harry Dugmore is helping to put the journalism back into citizen journalism, and it's working.
Can democracy work and good government happen without local media? The two are not the same thing, of course. Authoritarian governments can get the trains to run on time, and tip-top democracies can still have badly run councils. A double whammy is to have both low levels of democratic participation (even though people might vote once every five years), and poor government services. In many parts of South Africa, we have both whammies. Can local media, or ‘community’ media, make a difference? And if it does, how does it do that?
Our general experience in South Africa is that community media does make a difference, if only to make graft, corruption and inefficiency slightly more likely to be exposed.
A more specific example, of Grahamstown, our fairly representative of the rest of South Africa reinforces this ‘gut feel’ that good local journalism can play both watchdog and more proactive, get-people-involved roles.
In Grahamstown, a city of 100,000 people, we enjoy a twice-a-week community newspaper, Grocott’s Mail, which has been going now for 140 years. Anecdotally at least, many believe that the reasonable performance of our local council and police – compared to others in South Africa – might have something to do with the volume of coverage by Grocott’s Mail.
But how can local media achieve greater volumes of credible journalism that is good enough to make a difference? To be commercially viable, most community papers (and of course even most commercial papers) run on razor-thin staff complements. It is hard to get one reporter to a council meeting, let alone cover all the sub-committees.
That’s where citizen journalism could play a huge role. When our Iindaba Ziyafika (‘the news is coming’) project won a substantial three-year grant from the US-based Knight Foundation, the idea was to create and explore modus operandi that might have some useful lessons for elsewhere in the world.
The term citizen journalism has always been controversial. But we take the view that journalism, citizen or otherwise, has to adhere to some of the norms of short-form news journalism.
Citizen journalists have to learn that stories need to be ‘told’ (so a short narrative needs to be constructed) and that the story needs to give as full a picture as possible about the subject matter, and still be as ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’ as it can be.
Fullness, or at least adequate context, comes from focusing on the basics of ‘who, what, where, when and how’. Fairness stems, in part, from being open about your motive (why you, the writer, or the paper, or both, are running the story), balance (not just covering the bad stuff), multiple sourcing (‘one source is no source’ is one of our mantras) and affording a clear right of reply.
None of these is easy to do, but getting it mostly right means you have a much better chance of creating the kind of stories that readers are more likely to trust and act on.
Achieving this is not easy. In our experience, papers that want to do this need to provide a fair amount of training and, harder still, need to seed something of a ‘community of practice’. (This concept, coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, suggests that ongoing learning takes place best in groups where new knowledge and approaches can be easily shared, and where the sense of belonging to a group is a critical spur to a sense of identity, the development of which is the key to mastery in any profession.)
We offer our citizen journalists 20 hours of training over six weeks. The training focuses first on story selection – what is important, what is happening, what can be changed. Then we spend a lot of time on finding sources and interviewing skills. Many trainees are amazed that there are people whose job it is to talk to the media, and that they will talk to our CJs, especially if they develop some credibility with those sources.
Then we talk about how to achieve balance and fairness. But we also talk about going just that bit further than ‘standard’, ‘objective’ commercial media pieces, to working out ways to create more ‘empowering’ and ‘solution orientated’ stories. We want our writers to not just write about what is wrong, but to ask and explore how it is to be fixed. Better still, follow up, and follow up some more (something many papers have become poor at) until something happens!
Post training, we now also provide a dedicated citizen journalism editor and we encourage the most promising citizen journalists from each course (about 30 people complete each course) to attend diary meetings. We’ve also created our own citizen journalism diary meetings. And we pay for published articles and photos. It is a very modest amount, R100 (around $15) for a published article, but in a town where more than one in two people are unemployed (and for youth under 30, unemployment is two out of three), this can and is becoming a useful way to get some additional income.
Of course, when hearing about our approach a lot of people throw up their hands and say, okay, wait a second, your so-called citizen journalists are trained, there is post training mentoring, their copy is edited and fact checked, stories are paid for, and you even encourage them to join diary meetings with all the pros – how is this not just journalism en masse, rather than citizen journalism?
And if they are producing good stories, that make some difference, how is this not just a way of generating cheap copy? How is this not exploitative? And when the Knight Foundation grant is gone, how could you afford to give volunteers 20 hours of training, payment for stories and photos, and a sense of belonging to a group of people with an emerging quasi-professional identity? (Yes, we give our citizen journalists press cards!)
These are all good questions, but these citizen journalists remain dedicated and committed, some now for more than a year, because they know how to craft stories that do ‘get things done’. (Most often it is by shaming local officials into doing their jobs better, or getting local police to stop using the disabled parking bays when doing their grocery shopping!) They also get some of the collegiality and conviviality that comes from a work-like experience. Many are unemployed, but some have jobs and want to make a difference. About four or five people in each training group really get into it, and are we working hard to figure out why that is, and how to up these numbers.
Our first courses in 2009 produced few viable stories and little long-term interest. It was only when we created a more holistic experience, honed in on the training and the post training ‘space’ to build confidence and start creating some sense of identity as citizen journalists, that we started to see more regular contributions and, even more gratifyingly, some great journalism. Taken overall, our approach has produced about 70 published stories we would not otherwise have had in the past six months.
It’s early days, but watch this space – it might yet be filled with citizen journalism some day.
Professor Harry Dugmore is MTN Chair of Media and Mobile Communications at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. For examples of citizen journalism produced by the Iindaba Ziyafika project, see www.grocotts.co.za/category/section/mymakana.
