NDSA:Citizen Journalism

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At Risk Content: Citizen Journalism

Establish Value: Technologies such as social media and blogging platforms, increasing prevalence of cellular phones equipped with still and video cameras, and apps allowing easy ways to publish to the web, have enabled citizens to report breaking news and provide on-the-street accounts of events unfolding around the world. Citizen Journalism has has played an increasing role in the reporting of major global events such as the Arab Spring, the Japanese Earthquake, and Occupy movements. A study in 2010 found that citizen journalism complements professional journalism {http://digitaljournal.com/article/292589} . Citizen journalism content is not disseminated through traditional publishing, so NDSA members have faced challenges in identification, selection and preservation of content, as well as technological challenges in capturing content posted via popular social media services.

Recognize Opportunities: Social media and blogging platforms don’t readily allow via technical infrastructure easy ways for content creators to download and save their own content; and terms of service on social media sites often restrict cpying for preservation by libraries and archives, even if content creators are amenable to preservation. NDSA can work to reach out to content creators and publishing platform creators to bring awareness to preservation, and to engage stakeholders in selection of important content for preservation.

Target Audiences: These audiences share multiple levels of local, state, national, and international interest:

• Local communities: public libraries and historical societies; local newspaper publishers; genealogical societies; county and local governments; NGO's, high school educators
• State-wide communities: Academic researchers; lay historians; university students and professors; archives
• National and International communities: Trending researchers; political scholars; economic analysts

Educating Stakeholders: The NDSA seeks to communicate the need for preservation of citizen journalism content to stakeholders through multiple venues:

• Content creators: Online campaign to bring awareness to importance of preservation; targeted messages. Blogger conventions [idea from citizen journalism meeting?]
• Publishing platforms: Build and promote easy-to-use plugins and tools that allow opt-in for preservation or better ways of personal archiving and instructions for delivery to preservation organizations (Wordpress, Tumblr, etc.)
• Funders: J-lab and Knight Foundation
• Journalism schools
• Local governments
• High school educators:
• Public libraries and historical societies: Educate and partner with public libraries on local news preservation (local organications select, ; workshop presentations at district library association meetings; conference calls with public library directors.
• Historical researchers, professors, and students: Connect at journalism and historical association meetings and conferences; panel presentations at archivist society conferences; vendor booths, brochures, and flyers about digital preservation at relevant conferences.

Obstacles and Risk Factors: Possible risk factors and obstacles in citizen journalism preservation.

• Identification and selection is a challenge.
• Technological challenges in preserving youtube, facebook, twitter content with current crawler and access tools
• Rights policies unclear – may need to seek explicit permission from content creators or have them opt-in to preservation.
• Funding for digital preservation may not be readily available.
• Standards: There are many different and varied digital preservation strategies which makes it more difficult to provide education to stakeholders
• Awareness: Different levels of understanding among journalists about the importance of preservation

Actionable Items

• Definition of the term "citizen journalism" as it relates to selection of content for preservation