Latin American papers giving citizen journalism a go
Editor & Publisher editor Mark Fitzgerald wrote last week of his surprise to discover the inroads Latin American papers are making in citizen journalism. And why.
[El Tiempo, the big paper in Bogota, Colombia] has just marked the first anniversary of its El Tiempo Zona newspapers that take their content entirely from citizens in the neighborhood.
…”We don’t have reporters because the reporters don’t know the neighborhood, the neighbors know the neighborhood,” [said Ernesto Cortes Fierro, Editor in Chief of El Tiempo].
And the papers suspend many of the rules of journalism, he added. “Irreverence is valued,” he said.
Fitzgerald said O Globo in Rio de Janeiro is doing similar things, but with more input from professional journalists.
The whole point of view of these efforts are markedly different from that of U.S. newspapers, Fitzgerald wrote:
[In the U.S.,] the idea is that local news is the one franchise that differentiates newspapers from any other media pretenders. And with multi-media hyper-local initiatives, newspapers can offer the model of social networking with the power of print to encourage constant refreshment of the Web site.
The Latin papers were reacting to the Web, too — but they seem to see their local efforts as ways to imitate the Web’s interactivity and its encouragement of self-expression.
“People want to narrate their stories,” [Cortes Fierro] said. “People want to resolve their own problems. It is two-way content, and in a way it is a mutual rediscovery of the newspaper and the citizens.”
He closed by noting some ideas that didn’t work out so well:
When street demonstrations by university students in Venezuela last fall began to turn the tide against President Hugo Chavez’s proposed constitutional changes, the Caracas daily El Nacional gave students 15 video cameras to use for its Web site.
The newspaper got some great footage, and it got a huge spike in Web traffic. “But they never gave the cameras back,” Antonio Fernandez of El Nacional said.
Read the whole column in Editor & Publisher.
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:01 pm
I’d say the difference between the Latin American and the U.S. approach here are because many journalists have the mentality that “if it’s not on newsprint, it’s not journalism” so they’re unwilling to put anything besides the print product as a priority. Otherwise, similar thoughts are there, it’s just a matter of medium.