Transcript – Page 2 of 4

Now here’s the ethical twist: The site has achieved so much credibility, that earlier this spring, Maureen Mann was asked to run for state rep. She won.

She’s not the only one. In Westport, Connecticut, Gordon Joseloff, a former CBS newsman who retired and founded WestportNow because the town got little mainstream coverage, was elected the equivalent of mayor.

How dare they, you ask? Journalists don’t hold public office.

In a time when mainstream news organizations are losing credibility, what are the ethics of a publishing a site that gains such credibility in a community that citizens tap the site founders to represent them in public office as well?

What is giving them that credibility? And can we drink some of that juice?

Many mainstream journalists are now being asked to blog as well as cover their beats. And they are being asked to develop their “voice” in their blogs.

They are learning to navigate the tricky terrain of being citizen journalists who cover the place where they live and the issues that they have been involved in and have opinions about.

How dare they, you ask? That is a conflict of interest. They must recuse themselves.

Well, of course, in the world of citizen media, there rarely are understudies. Our Chappaqua crew tries to cover those issues fairly, but they have an intriguing concept of what value they can add: “We believe that the advantage to us of knowing the issues from very close up – even from inside – is greater than the difficulty of remaining balanced in our coverage,” said one of the co-founders.

“And we’re pretty confident that what people want is not just straight coverage of all news, but for us to pick and choose what’s important and present it to them in an interesting way.” Recently the local Board of Education took the time to weigh in on the site with a lengthy letter explaining why they were imposing school scheduling changes.

We as traditional journalists have been trained to leave our local knowledge at the door and cover stories from a totally dispassionate, uninvolved point of view. Are we adding all the value we could? Ethically, what would fair, value-added coverage look like? Would it look like Chappaqua’s?

It is here – on these hyperlocal sites – that the systemic conventions of inverted pyramids and fair and "balanced" stories seem to be increasingly out of sync with information conveyed amid a keen caring about community.

How dare she, you ask? Isn’t that sloppy journalism?

Increasingly, we are finding that some of these hyperlocal news sites are so valuable that local municipalities are requesting coverage.

When the Route 7 Report first launched as a free newspaper in Coolsville and Tuppers Plains, Ohio, officials in the local townships were not very excited about having citizen reporters covering their meetings. “But after a few months of matter-of-fact coverage, trustees of the neighboring Troy Township actually called and asked if we could do the same for them,” said Bill Reader, an Ohio University professor who helped local residents launch the paper.

How does this square with the usual journalistic ethos of: “Well, if we made them mad, we must be doing something right”?

And with all the attention we pay to diversity in the nation’s newsrooms, it is here in the land of hyperlocal news sites where diverse voices are finding their oxygen. Take a look at the Twin Cities Daily Planet, which aggregates ethnic news in Minneapolis and St. Paul, or GreaterFultonNews.org, which covers Richmond’s mostly African-American Fulton Hill. If mainstream news organizations are faltering in covering minority communities well, would it not be more ethical to empower those communities to speak for themselves?

I find it fascinating to see how citizen media makers frame news stories. Rarely do they use conflict as a frame. If they cover a meeting and everyone agrees on something, that ’s the way they write it. (Continue >>)

Questions or comments? E-mail Jan.