A new research from the University of Missouri School of Journalism shows that traditional media still holds a better position than citizen journalism, in professionalism, comprehensiveness, as well as in broadcast and distribution technology.
Over the recent months, the deteriorating financial condition in which newspapers have found themselves has prompted a lot of comments on their faith, as well as on the gap they will leave behind. Some market analysts have been quick to point out that citizen media, as in independent news sites and agencies, as well as blogs, would rush in and fill the void, while at the same time providing news services of a decent quality.
“We found that legacy sites offered almost double the percent of news (89 percent) in comparison with citizen news sites (56 percent) and three times that of blogs (27 percent). The topic coverage on blogs and citizen new sites is generally narrow and the sourcing is light,” UMSJ faculty Chair in Strategic Communication Margaret Duffy explained.
“One of the biggest surprises we found was that mainstream media Web sites were almost as welcoming to citizen participation as citizen journalism sites, and they were far more welcoming than blogs. Many industry professionals hope that citizen sites will democratize news media, but that hope has yet to be realized,” Associate Dean for graduate studies Esther Thorson added.
A team of investigators, consisting of Thorson, Duffy, Michigan State University Professor Steve Lacy, and University of North Carolina Professor Dan Riffe, analyzed citizen media outlets in 47 American cities, and learned that, on average, each of the cities had only two or three citizen news sites. Of the discovered pages, about 66 percent were blogs and the rest were actual news sites.
Duffy shared that many of the sites that were discovered were in a “dormant state,” or hadn't been updated in a long time. She added that, while some independent news agencies were doing just fine, others were fighting for their very survival and faced bankruptcy just as much as newspapers did in the “real world.”
The study also revealed that citizen media websites often had links within their articles to traditional media outlets. The same was twice less likely to happen in the opposite direction, from established outlets to citizen media. In addition, blogs and other news sites were also very likely to have at least one link to an outside source in their articles, as opposed to the “competition,” which often made its own stories. The team also learned that few citizen news sites had policies for regulating comments, posts and other materials contributed by their users.
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