"Citizen Journalism"

On wikipedia "citizen journalism" is kind of like public journalism. Now that's something I can talk about. Basically it is about involving the public or the citizens in many or every aspect of the newsgathering process, and really letting them decide what they want to hear. I had the opportunity to be part of a public journalism exercise this year while working on a women's show called Women on the Move on Radio Grahamstown earlier in the year. Our class of 5 girls expected this to be easy to identify with since we were all women and this was a show about women, for women. However, we were in for a rude awakening. Radio Grahamstown's target audience was very different to us. We were now producing radio for women struggling with many different issues to us. This called for some in depth research. We conducted an all round interview with ordinary people in the street and discovered that there was so much we didn't know. The pertinent issues that arose such as unemployment and starting your own business, violence against women and general health and HIV issues were not exactly what we expected, especially not the way the women felt about these issues. The main issue here is that we would have been providing a product no one wanted if we did not do this research. Another aspect of this show was that it was a phone in show, so most of the show's content was meant to be taken up by phonecalls. Granted that didn't happen too successfully, but it was very important to us to find out exactly what the women of Grahamstown East wanted to listen to, and what an amazing experience it was to just get one phonecall from someone looking for advice from one of the guests. it sounds cliched, but just knowing that someone was listening was enough reward.
Radio Grahamstown is a community radio station and the people that work there are part of the community. The enthusiasm showed by our host Nwabisa and our guests was inspiring, and for the first time I felt part of real radio (if you can call it that).
Brett Davidson from Idasa wrote a paper called "Mapping the Radio KC Community" and in it he describes how the people from Radio KC in Cape Town got actively involved in understanding and discovering part of their audience that they never really knew they reached. It is one of the best examples of public journalism I have read about. I do agree that public journalism is a difficult thing to implement, but where possible it can create such valuable journalism that outweighs the struggles of implementing it.