Spain: the challenges of participatory journalism

Posted by John Burke on July 3, 2006 at 8:00 PM

Juan Varela at Periodistas 21 reports on how citizen journalists contributed to a tragic story about an accident in a metro in Valencia. Immediately, the Spanish mainstream media solicited photos from eyewitnesses, receiving many. But at the same time that images from ubiquitous digital devices can add to reporting, Varela says that they present new challenges to journalism.

the division between testimonies that help to understand information about a tragedy versus those which only feed morbid visions of the event
since journalism is a labor of verification, more work needs to be done by editors to make sure that images and text aren't manipulated
mainstream media also needs to distinguish between first-hand accounts of a story and opinion from those who may be expressing their feelings about an event
because mainstream news organizations know that their website traffic augments significantly with galleries, they must maintain the same standards of photography with citizen contributions that they do with professional photography in order not to compromise themselves
too many citizen contributions just creates noise. The MSM must edit so that the audience doesn't become confused by too much information

Source: Periodistas 21 (in Spanish)