One thing that makes me really angry is the claim so many media outlets are making to have citizen journalists. Most of theses claims start out fine and good, but they end up being nothing but crap.
No, they end up less than crap. They end up being nothing.
Nothing at all.
I don't know what happens. The person responsible for overseeing that moves on, gets bored, finds another job and doesn't train a successor. Maybe the successor gets bored and finds another job.
I signed up for our local writers group to be a 'citizen journalist' in two of the local papers. One Brown County paper (The Brown County Press), one Adams County paper(The People's Defender). I'd write the articles, and submit them online (for the online editions of the paper.) The person at the other end had to approve the articles and then okay them before they could be posted.
I have no problem with that. If there isn't some regulation, anyone would say anything, and respectable newspaper sites would soon all look like Topix sites. Even Citizen Journalists should be concerned with concepts that at least resemble news instead of middle school name-calling.
The problem occurs somewhere down the line, when things change at the other end of the process. The CJ blogs in the Brown County Press lasted just under a year before the editor at the other end just quit approving things for publication. Nothing was going through. It wasn't just our articles that weren't going through, it was anyone's. Everyone's.
No Citizen Journals were being furthered, but the blurb remained on the website encouraging sign ups.
The People's Defender stated that after they got a feel for your writing, if all was well, they could and would set the articles to auto-approve. I could write them, and they would post. Good deal.
Except that within three months, no one there was approving anything. let alone setting anything up for automatic. It was, and is, very much like throwing one's words into a black hole.
I have a lot of articles submitted and never approved. What am I to do with these articles? True, they are no longer timely, but that isn't always an issue. These are my words, my work, and I crafted them as carefully as I could. They were intended, after all, for a journalistic website.
I can't use them anywhere else, since they more or less belong to the papers they were intended for. Even if that isn't strictly true, I can hardly take the articles elsewhere. What if someone decides to go ahead and publish them, even after all this time? How does that make me look, as a writer striving for professionalism?
If you are thinking of signing up somewhere locally as a citizen journalist, please consider these points. Check out the editor, check the execution. Don't let your work go to waste in someone else's database.
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