Why I still believe in citizen journalism

A week after I returned to work from maternity leave – and two weeks before I was laid off – I had lunch with Mary Lou Fulton, a vice president at The Bakersfield Californian, whose charge has been to grow audience through new products. She is a mentor and a role model for me, and I would love to do what she does: Start new products, teach others to make them successful, then move on to the next adventure. She is an idea machine. She also has a smooth way of talking that makes me a believer in anything she's pitching.

I needed to have lunch with her because she invigorates me, and I was sorely in need of some inspiration to return to my job as Contributions Editor. While I was on maternity leave, the newspaper had a round of layoffs. I was a pseudo-survivor. While my management-level position was eliminated and my three team members were farmed out to other departments, I was offered to return to a demoted position – still called Contributions Editor – for less pay. I tearfully accepted the position. (I blame post-partum hormones for the tears.) Then I vowed to find another job before my maternity leave was up. Well, job searching while caring for a newborn as a first-time mother is exhausting and frustrating. After many more tears, I gave up and decided to go back to work at The Californian until they escorted me out of the door. As fate would have it, the escort service arrived just three weeks later.

But back to that lunch with Mary Lou. I had been given an assignment which brought back my original fears about citizen journalism – that it was a plot to replace skilled journalists with free labor and lower quality content. My task was to create a long list of people who are connected in the community and ask them to contribute nuggets of news for us to print. With another round of layoffs imminent, was I gathering scabs? No, Mary Lou and I agreed. I was just being proactive about getting news tips, and these tips would be vetted by editors before running in the paper.

The bigger question, Mary Lou asked me, is how can I reach out to undercovered communities so they can have voices on Bakersfield.com and in The Bakersfield Californian. Yes! This is why I loved being the Contributions Editor. With our reporting staff continually shrinking, citizen journalism enabled us to get stories into our products that otherwise wouldn't – couldn't – be told. Mary Lou and I brainstormed ideas for groups to reach out to: nonprofits, churches, schools. Within each group would be a diverse cross-section of our community.

I reminded myself of the reasons I believe in citizen journalism: (And this is straight out of the PowerPoint I've given to fellow journalists)
-- It creates a two-way conversation with your audience.
-- The audience participates in the media, not just consumes it.
-- It eliminates news professionals as gatekeepers of information.
-- It gives your media organization a competitive advantage.

But even more than that, sometimes citizen journalists have great stories to tell. And with a little help from a professional editor, the rocks can be tumbled and shined into gleaming gems. In my two years as Contributions Editor at The Californian, I have laughed, I have cried, I have jumped up from my desk and shared what I just read with a neighboring editor. I've also winced, groaned and rolled my eyes at some really bad writing (especially poetry). But sometimes people would submit the most beautiful photos and the most heartfelt tales.

There was the mother whose son died from an accidental gunshot who wrote about bringing herself to unpack his books to share his love of reading with her stepchildren. There was the military wife who wrote about her excitement for her husband to come home from Iraq for two weeks and celebrate their daughter's second birthday together. And the mother who wrote about what it's like to know her daughter's killer is still on the loose and the case has gone cold. (Stories by mothers are the most powerful to me.)

A common theme among many of the citizen journalism pieces submitted under my watch was that they were deeply personal. Sure, there were press releases by public relations professionals and organizations getting the word out about their events. But most of the stories were about family, friendship, personal achievement, obstacles overcome, and special memories. These are the stories important to our readers and I felt very fortunate as an editor to help them shape and share their stories.

Every contributed article I pitched for print was edited and fact-checked by me. Before I sent the story to the copy desk, I e-mailed it back to the author to make sure I didn't introduce any errors in the editing process and so he or she wouldn't be surprised to see the edits in print. I treated every citizen journalist as if he or she was a staff writer and asked the contributor to fill holes or answer key questions. The editing process on amateur pieces is time consuming but well worth it. Writers often thanked me for making their stories better and our readers got a better product because of it.

Reporters and editors at The Californian also thanked me regularly for taking stories off their hands and working directly with the public. It freed them to do more skilled, investigative work while community members submitted their own hometown news stories. This approach to “hyper-local news” satisfied our readers' needs to see good news in the paper and our staff's needs to focus their time on more in-depth, watchdog reporting.

This is why I still believe in citizen journalism. It gives a voice to the community that the newspaper just can't afford to do themselves. However, the newspaper won't be the venue for this content much longer. As newspapers stop trying to be all things to all people, niche Web sites and publications will fill in the gaps of hyper-local information sharing. All over the country, one-man bands are launching community Web sites to serve their local niche markets. Many use bloggers, freelancers and concerned citizens to write much of the content for these sites.

The Bakersfield Californian, with Mary Lou Fulton's lead, had incredible insight into this future of journalism when it launched Mercado Nuevo. The subsidiary company manages three niche sites with accompanying print products – with nearly all of the content produces by citizen journalists and bloggers. These are The Bakersfield Voice (serving west Bakersfield), Mas Magazine (serving the Latino community), and Bakotopia (serving the youth and music scene). But even these products are being scaled back as the company tightens its belt further and further. Once a bustling company all of its own, Mercado Nuevo's operations are slowly being moved into The Californian's building, with the newsroom now copy editing and designing the print products. After the March layoff, the newsroom has 26 percent fewer staff members doing far more work. And it's going to get worse.

(By the way, why did it make sense for The Bakersfield Californian to eliminate the Contributions Editor position in the last round of layoffs when they seem to need it more than ever? For the same reason they eliminated the Web Editor position when they went Web-first: To charge all newsroom leaders to be contributions editors, just like they made all editors into Web editors. The newspaper is filled with more community content than ever before and they didn't need me alone to do the dirty work.)

The market is wide open in Bakersfield for community members to launch their own Web sites to better serve the local audience. And one man is trying to do just that. Nick Belardes, a local author, has recently created FaceBakersfield.com, a site about local news, sports, pop culture and fiction. I'll be visiting with him soon to learn more about his site and I'll share my insights on this blog.