| By Ron Ross |
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| January 5, 2012 05:00 AM EST |
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An iPhone or a Smartphone can be a wonderful thing. You can do...well, darn near anything with it...including record for posterity any event within eye-range or should I say, I-range.
Unless you want to become famous (or infamous), don't lose your temper at the check-out stand or yell at your kid in the WalMart parking lot. If you do, soon 145,329 (more or less) people could view it on the Internet because some guy caught it on his Smartphone, uploaded it to YouTube, then tweeted and Facebooked it even before you got to your car.
From this day forward, politicians at every level, classroom professors, town cops, TSA agents, and even FedEx delivery folks must be on their best behavior at all times. If not, their misadventures will be caught on tape and published for posterity.
We used to complain that Big Brother was watching us. Well, he is - security cameras are now ubiquitous, but your little brother and his anonymous film crew of thousands are also pointing and shooting their Smartphones at our every act of clumsiness, stupidity or illegality. This makes it very difficult to "spin" our faux pas once our wife or boss or principal or constituents or friends or enemies see it in living color. No one can get away with even a little prank without the whole world finding out.
Smartphones are good, I suppose, for citizen journalists. It allows them to break news before the mainstream media get back to their vans to edit their tape for broadcast.
But the problem is context. A properly prepared and delivered news story takes time and work. The reader/listener/viewer needs context to fully understand what they are viewing, not just raw footage. A serious journalist always tells the whole story of who, what, where, why, when and how, not just the slip-and-fall part.
In our book, "Handbook for Citizen Journalists" my co-author Susan Carson Cormier and I write that those who make intermittent or perhaps only once-in-a-lifetime Smartphone postings should not be referred to as citizen journalists. We call them "accidental citizen journalists" because that's what they are. They are citizens who just happened to be somewhere when something interesting transpired and they pointed their Smartphone at it.
Filming something doesn't make you a journalist any more than using your microwave oven makes you a gourmet chef.
Besides that, accidental citizen journalists have no training in legitimate journalism and no editor to demand they report the whole story. Historically, these kinds of people were referred to as eye-witnesses. They would be interviewed by a reporter then have their comments placed within the full context of a story.
A serious citizen journalist knows that no 44-second clip of someone's violation of accepted social norms is the whole story. A serous citizen journalist knows how to put their stories in context.
Ron Ross' first job was as a newspaper delivery boy for the Omaha World Herald in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He earned his first byline front-page story as a writer for his high school newspaper. While in high school, he served as a Citizen Journalist by reporting all of his high school sports scores to a local radio station. After high school, he entered college and graduated from Nebraska Christian College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1965. He pastored church in Kansas, and then took his wife and two children to Zambia (in central Africa) for seven years of in-service to his denomination as a missionary.
Upon return to the United States he pastored churches in Nebraska, Texas and Colorado. He completed work for a Master of Divinity Degree at Creighton University and a Doctor of Theology degree at Biblical Life College & Seminary.
He wrote the book, Your Family Heritage, a Guide to Preserving Family History, which was considered one of the seminal resources for oral history taking. He has lectured often on the subject for the Colorado Historical Society.
He has written numerous articles for a variety of periodicals, been a columnist for his county newspaper and active in his community in a variety of ways. He published several official football annuals for major universities and was the editor/publisher of Business Trend Magazine.
More recently, he was the owner of Tidbits of Douglas County (Colorado), an entertainment weekly that he sold after 12 years as owner/publisher. While a Tidbits publisher he served as the "Dean" of Tidbits University, a three-day program that teaches new publishers how to publish a successful Tidbits paper in their communities. Dr. Ross wrote the training program and taught new Tidbits publishers for several years. He continues to participate in each Tidbits University as a guest lecturer. He writes a weekly motivational/inspirational column that is published in several papers and was repurposed as a brief motivational video and posted on YouTube.
Dr. Ross is now the publisher of Tidbits of Greeley, Colorado. He lives in Loveland, Colorado.
In 2008, Dr. Ross saw the need for local communities to have their own on-line newspapers so he began investigating a variety of ways that could be accomplished. He decided that skilled citizen journalists were needed to make such a website successful. He came up with the idea of a series of low-cost webinars that citizens could take to learn the fundamentals of researching, interviewing and writing articles about local news and features. The idea took on a life of its own when his vision was expanded to the National Association of Citizen Journalists.
He shared this vision with Susan Cormier, a former newspaper reporter and editor who he had come to know and whose talents he recognized by working with her in a local networking group. Together, they created the National Association of Citizen Journalists. They visualize a vibrant nationwide (potentially worldwide) organization that recruits, trains and motivates citizens to write, produce and publish news about their local communities.
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