Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park is justly famous as a place where everyman can voice an opinion, literally stand on a soapbox and expound. People listen and heckle but one man’s views have an airing in a public forum. Take that very human phenomenon; add 21^st century technology and you have the user-generated content of today.

Blogs, commentary and user-submitted eyewitness accounts of events are dramatically altering what we think of as journalism and the style in which reporters write. They have also eroded the public’s trust in what they read. Based on decades of trustworthy reporting and the knowledge that published information was subjected to some rigorous editorial process, we believed the media. Journalists were impartial; they told us what happened without bias or judgment and we drew our own conclusions. Now we can bypass the entire publishing edifice and go straight to those conclusions, right or wrong, informed or baseless.

We can also subscribe to what purports to be “fair and balanced” reporting but is anything but. The rise of citizen journalism and of point of view journalism means that there is more opinion and bias out there than ever before—not to mention some things that are simply incorrect.

The Pew Research Center’s 2009  survey found that, “The public’s assessment of the accuracy of news stories is now at its lowest level in more than two decades.”

RA

Every opinion is a valid opinion but what makes one person’s opinion more valuable than another’s? Anyone can now be a publisher but why should I believe you or even care what you think?

In the not-so-distant past, journalism professors marked students’ papers with an unwelcome red RA in the margin. That stood for “rat’s ass,” as in, who gives a rat’s ass what you think? It indicated that the student had wandered away from objective reporting into editorializing. Opinion was reserved for editors and columnists, people with decades of experience and recognized areas of expertise.

Journalism and even creative writing students were told that writing in the first person was extremely difficult to do well and should be avoided unless absolutely necessary. Reporters never injected themselves into the story. Writers referred to themselves in the third person, as in “when asked by a reporter…”

And then came the confessional era, first on television and then in blogging. We watched people bare their souls and their dirty laundry on daytime talk shows. We read memoirs of abusive childhoods and dysfunctional families. At the same time, there were several high-profile journalistic hoaxes. Jayson Blair, a reporter for the New York Times and Stephen Glass, a reporter for The New Republic among others made up people, quotes and events.

Suddenly, journalists didn’t look so trustworthy and the real-life exploits of people like us had a compelling edge that objectivity shaved off. If nothing else, we could compare our own lives favorably to the train wrecks we saw on shows like Jerry Springer and Ricky Lake. Then came reality media and all bets were off.

The first person might be difficult to do well but the bar for what constitutes “well” is now extremely low.

Over Sharing

The “over-sharing” of blogs began the process of minute-by-minute accounts of everyday life that has culminated (one can only hope) in the often-inane postings on Twitter. “Blogging, the first form of social media to be widely adopted beyond the world of technology

enthusiasts, gave us a template for all the other forms that would follow,” writes Scott Rosenberg, in Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming and Why It Matters. (To read our interview with Rosenberg, read next Monday’s post.)

For a while, many believed that blogging was the future of journalism. But blogs have settled into their original intent: logs of daily activities, diary entries full of opinion and impressions. The good ones resemble the editorial page of a newspaper rather than a Speaker’s Corner harangue. Some of them make their authors rich; witness the Julie/Julia Project, which culminated in the movie Julie and Julia. Others give their writers an outlet but attract no following.

The title of another Pew Charitable Trust study says it all in terms of where blogs have gone: Blogging is for Old People.  Younger readers see blogging as a fairly traditional medium at this point and neither write them nor read them.

Truthiness

Web 2.0, obviously, made self-publishing all the easier. Readers had discovered the power of the pen and, with no reporting skills to speak of, wrote in the first person, often badly. Some of that has

settled down as well. Studies show that advertisers prefer to have online ads placed next to professionally produced copy rather than user-generated content. Users want the option to comment and provide feedback but actually prefer expert opinion to non-professional content, or a combination of the two with clear indicators as to which is which.

Still, the annual Edelman Trust Barometer shows that we need to hear something four to five times before we believe it. We are not, however, picky about the source. We might read something in a blog, have it validated by our next door neighbor, hear it on talk radio and then Google it—where the same sources (except for the next door neighbor) will come up. That none of these is a source with very rigorous fact checking standards doesn’t seem to bother us. In fact, we trust “people like me” far more than the press. First-person experience with a product, a service, even a factoid is more credible than the media we trusted for years.

Bloggers write “with color, emotion and opinion for an online audience that does not demand the objectivity that traditional journalists regard as the sine qua non of their work,” writes Liesl Schillinger in the New York Times.

Look at the front page of any daily paper and you will see a much more feature magazine approach to stories than in the past.

Writers inject themselves into articles often. They try to combine both worlds: the seasoned reporter backed by a news organization and the Regular Joe man on the street.

It’s an awkward straddle that leaves many journalists stranded neither place, no longer respected for doing their jobs and disingenuous about the aw-shucks voice they assume.

We respect and trust a reporter embedded with the military in Iraq writing as the bullets fly overhead. We are more skeptical of other sorts of first-person reporting and more likely to go looking for someone “like me” to give us an eye witness if untutored account.

Still, several questions need to be answered:

• What are the limits and uses of the first person?
• Is “truthiness” good enough? The American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year in 2005, truthiness is “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.”
• Does democratization equal dumbing down?
• Are we a nation of narcissists more interested in our own tiny purview and willingly ignorant of the larger world?

Read the next chapter of A Fresh, Ferocious Wave, uploading for the next four Mondays, to see what we find.