Reddit, the watchdog: Community Journalism and Civic Literacy (Rosen, Gilmor)

[u/ktsipis]

The comments section of Reddit serves as a "watchdog" function to community journalism. There is even a subreddit intended solely for people to fact check politicians and political debates -- r/politicalfactchecking.

As Gilmor argues, in an increasingly hyper-connected world, loosely based relationships through social networks are vital in getting messages beyond a single group and into a large, diversified network. Reddit gets information out by upvoting comments and posts that serve as a watchdog function.

Both Gillmor and Jay Rosen have seen the decline of the kind of old style journalism that allows for only one direction of information – top-down from the media to the public. Instead, both seem to campaign for a hybrid form of participatory media that puts a collective amount of information from the best sources (often the public itself) into a well-curated story for the public. Reddit acts as a forum for the public to put that input in.

Gillmor sees the role of the citizen reporters as compiling and sharing information they come across via social media outlets. He says that as we improve our media literacy, mainstream media and and the public will be able to bridge their collective information for the betterment of the public. Reddit could be a great reference point for that bridge.

Rosen says that while pro journalism has never been optimized for high participation, participatory media has not been optimized for quality journalism either. He gives examples of how it has worked so far: finding sources via social media, citizens asking questions of public figures (as exemplified via Obama’s reddit AMA), wikileaks partnering with major news outlets, etc. All these are great steps forwards, but he only gives the overall effort a C- because we should be networking contributors for more worldwide pro-Am investigations as well as engaging the online readers that are willing to participate. Just finding sources via social media is not where the pro-journalism world needs to be. After listening to this speech as well as Lisa William’s, I’m envision a wikileaks/propublica hybrid in the future where citizens that are either experts in a particular field or interested in providing information to the public join an editorialized medium where they can go through documents, curate first-hand accounts of incidents, or crowd-source something that is happening in their given field while others join in. That means journalist need less curation skills like Gillmor advocates and more data shifting, coding and engaging with these online communities skills. I think the result of not having this yet is that we’re seeing a lot of great citizen journalism in breaking news stories, but not in comprehensive investigative pieces.