The "citizen journalist" and "bittergate"

Hi fellow Poynterites --

I'm curious as to everyone's thoughts on Mayhill Flower's surrepitious recording of Obama's speech at a closed fundraiser and all the defenses/criticisms that have sprung up afterwards.

It's providing a fine teaching moment (I'm having my students do an in-class debate discussing this episode, as well as the behavior of the ABC journalists during the debate.)

Here's my take. I'm not surprised by the "there are no rules; everyone has a role" defense being tossed around by Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis and others. They have their talking points down pretty well by now. I worked with Rosen on getting NewAssignment.Net off the ground and have had some involvement with "citizen journalists." Overall, I think the jury is still out on whether the concept can work. There are moments when it does, such as the efforts by the Fort Myers News-Press. And, I agree with Mindy and I don't think that this is a time to be discussing "who is a journalist" -- lots of air has been spent on that in past years.

Here's the rub for me. Credibility is the one and only chip that journalists, citizens or otherwise, can bargain with. The behavior of journalists in recent years, thanks in large part to the demands of the 24 hour news cycle, has done little to build on that credibility. Not too much trusting going on out there.

What has always helped journalists in this regard is identification. Rule #1 in Journalism 100 is to identify yourself. That way people know that what they say and do is subject to reporting, recording and could end up on a blog, Web site, cable, etc. Fundamentally, identification comes down to fairness.

I'm not sure that happened here. Having read what Fowler had to say about the whole identification process, it's not even clear Fowler knew what the ground rules were going in, and certainly Obama's people thought Fowler was not acting in a journalist's role.

And, what about the role of Fowler's editor? Did the editor know about the murky waters surrounding identification? I recall working with one "citizen journalist" at New Assignment and explaining that submitting his story to the source for pre-publication approval was not a journalistic norm. But then we get back to the "no rules" thing.

So, when Rosen, Jarvis et al say the rules no longer apply, does that mean that identification is no longer needed? We can now all go skulking around trying to obtain meaty sound bites that we can immediately throw up on a Web site to gain a little notoriety? I'm not too sure that's a good thing. Saying there are "no rules" just seems a little simplistic and naive. Don't we need rules in order to be fair and balanced -- no matter how you define yourself on the journalistic spectrum?

Hope all is well,
Fox