The state of the media and the potential role for citizen journalists is (at least in the case of the former) an important issue for all of us. In business schools at least, the role and operation media is an issue that get skant critical coverage. This is a pity because without consistent, detailed coverage of key issues, we cannot be informed citizens and without an informed approach to using the media we cannot safely use it in a functional way (to understand the broader commercial environment, for example).

Given the apparent crisis in the media, brought about by shifts in revenue sources (advertising) from the mainstream national and local press to website (such as eBay and Craigslist, but also news aggregators like Google and Yahoo), considering other business models for acquiring news, particularly with an analytical or critical approach is important. Citizen journalism might provided a useful augmentation to professional journalism (in whatever state) for certainly academic publishing is not a route to timely economic, political and social insight.

There might be a range of activities that could be defined as citizen journalism. On the immediate and shallow there are contributions to twitter, flickr and other instant publishing site. These might be suitable for reporting news as it happens for events such as natural and civil disturbances. At the other end there might be individuals or groups with considerable expertise that research and publish into an issue. Here we might imagine a group of citizens concerned about local government corruption steadily analysing and reporting on zoning decisions.

Criticism of citizen journalism is, inter alia, based on the assumption that Joe Blow, bored with publishing cat-on-skateboard clips to YouTube will now move on to cover corruption at city hall and, to be fair to the critics, this appears to be the dominant genre at the moment. Current citizen journalists are often telling personal stories, which however moving, are just one side of the story (such as in the Huffington Post stories, particularly on insurance and healthcare). This lack of perspective (or the need for the reader to research to add the perspective) is a significant difference to good, traditional journalism, which puts both sides of the story on the reader’s plate (see discussion / comment in Citizen Journalism: Receipe for Disaster? by Ron Steinman).

What sometimes seems ignored is that good investigative stories are more than just the journalist, requiring input from domain experts. So, a good story about systemic corruption requires input from experts on the law, maybe economists who can value the cost of the curruption, etc. If journalism becomes underfunded, citizen journalists must emerge as the co-ordinators and writers of the stories (given that the domain experts are probably still in place) or that the domain experts who were prepared to comment to journalists must now comment themselves.

Where those domain experts are university faculty, it strikes me that there is something of a public engagement obligation to ensure these issues are aired, irrespective of the mode (academic publishing, comment to mainstream newspapers, or on university and private blogs and other news sites).