Modul Mata Kuliah Journalisme Online - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

call, the industry would die.
Perhaps the best way to analyse the impact, and therefore any proposed threat, of reader interaction
with news reports is to observe the journalistic participation of victims of global natural and terrorist
disasters. For example, the Tsunami that struck the East on Christmas Eve 2004, Hurricane Katrina that
struck New Orleans, America in 2005 and events such as the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Centre in
New York, America and the 07/07 London attack in England. In both sets of circumstances, evidence of
the drive for normal citizens to record and broadcast the experience is apparent. Videos, still images,
recorded interviews and statements provided news content to explain the situation to the watching
public. Here, it can be observed that the news became not just a factual report, not even a witness
statement, but an actual live recording of an event, first hand. In this, those citizens who chose to record
and document their experiences placed themselves in the line of danger as would a highly trained wartime
correspondents, overriding a biological drive to escape and survive, instead, they chose to record
and broadcast.
The worry of professional journalists lies not in recording of events, as any footage or recollection of a
situation contributes to the general public awareness of world-events, but in the analysis and discussion
of the happenings. The concern of maintained objectivity arises as communities reporting on local
events will ultimately by affected by the consequences and therefore, even unintentionally, biased
toward the situation. Andrew Keen, in his book The Cult of the Amateur raises the idea that this loss of
pure truth arises “because democratization, despite its lofty idealization, is undermining truth, souring
civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience, and talent.” (Keene, 2007, p.15)
Only those with professional training in remaining morally, ethically and (perhaps most importantly in
the modern age) legally just, can seek to comment fairly and abstractly on a news issue. Keene likens the
modern users of Web 2.0 to monkeys, typing away in “an infinite universe” (Keene, 2007, p.15),
generating an endless stream of personal truths. Instead of there existing a factual, definite truth, each
person takes and gives to the collective Web 2.0 knowledge, “shattering the world into a billion
personalized truths, each seemingly equally valid and worthwhile”. (Keene, 2007, p.17) Truth has
become an amalgamation of people's personal opinion, distributed onto a virtual storage system with
no moderator, no censor, no fact-checker. The possible emergence of such a regulatory figure of
organisation is discussed by Dan Gillmor, who looks at services like Technorati and Feedster, that
browse and search web content and “may enable “consumers” of journalism to sort through the
opinionated conversations and assemble something resembling reality, or maybe even truth” (Gillmor,
2006, p.42).
Hailing such tools as the pioneer of content screening, a kind of intelligent RSS, he is however, keen to
point out the flaw in the system; that they are simply just tools. They cannot replace either journalism or
user-generated content as they cannot assure the core values of journalism; “fairness, accuracy and
thoroughness” (Gillmor, 2006, p.42), or span the full scope of the available public media.
With this in mind, it can be seen that citizen journalism, whilst an exciting new medium for the delivery
of news information, also has its faults. The main problem it faces is that, unlike professional journalism,
it has no code of conduct or set of underlying principles that it must abide by. Richard Keeble explains in
Ethics for Journalists that professional journalism bases its ethics on a multitude of various codes of
practice, each with the same underlying core values of truth and respect (Keeble, 2001, pp.14-15).
Citizen, democratic journalism is not the result of formal training in the rights and wrongs of informing
the general public of other people's business morally and legally. In such, it often becomes a melee of