Citizen journalism? What's in a name?

Jeff Jarvis is backing away from that loaded term "citizen journalism," and contemplating "networked journalism" as an alternative. Shakespeare said a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but is it necessarily the same rose? I think the real problem in the debate over so-called citizen journalism has been a lack of concensus over what process is being described, not merely the label we attach to it.

One view apparently holds that "citizens" (who apparently are quite separate from professionals) are going to be "trained" to do "journalism" (which apparently has to do with writing inverted-pyramid accounts of tragically boring public meetings).

Some seem to believe that "citizen journalism" consists of being on the scene of some public tragedy with a cameraphone. Zealots seem to believe that Big Media will come crashing down, to be replaced by a thousand blooming poppies. Among some trade unionists there is a fear that publishers are conspiring to replace reporters and photographers with unpaid stringers.

(There is some legitimacy to that bit of paranoia. After we launched Bluffton Today I fielded a series of phone calls from publishers eager to get some of that creamy citJ goodness to cheaply fill their news columns and their weekly shoppers.)

Our language gets in the way of our understanding.

One of my colleagues would prefer to simply drop the "journalism" word when discussing anything outside the boundaries of the professional process. That at least would cleanse our doors of perception.

But it would be at a cost: all too easily we could ignore the fundamental changes in the professional process that must be made in order to adjust to the power shifts that have come about in this new networked world. In using the term "networked journalism," Jarvis seems to be refocusing somewhat on what professional journalists (should) do. I like that.

As they nurtured the idea that eventually became Bluffton Today, my friends in our newspaper division spent many months wrestling with basic questions about content, tone and especially civic processes. They didn't come up with a label, and they certainly didn't call it citizen journalism. But they did come up with a catchphrase: "A community in conversation with itself."

I like it. For too long, too many professionals have imagined journalism to be a one-way process. It isn't. It never has been. The Internet may amplify the community conversation so we can hear with our tin professionalized ears, but that conversation has been there all along.

Professional journalism involves playing a complex role of leadership, initiation, verification and facilitation in that broadly shared conversation. Networked? Yes, always.