THE CITIZEN JOURNALISM MANUAL…

17. Writing: a few considerations

Russ Grayson

Published in

PacificEdge

9 min readJul 30, 2022

The central dilemma in journalism is that you don’t know what you don’t know…Bob Woodward.

Videographer, Peter Dowson from Digital Storytellers shooting a public event at Randwick Sustainability Hub.

BEFORE WE START writing let’s think about some big-picture considerations around both conventional and citizen journalism.

We will start with something that determines what we report on and what we don’t.

Newsworthiness: what do we report on?

Newsworthiness is a filter we use to make a decision on whether to devote time to a story. A story must be of interest to our readership to make it newsworthy.

Newsworthiness hinges on a number of questions:

is a topic the media organisation or citizen journalist regularly reports on?
would it interest our readers/viewers?
is it something new?
is it a development of existing news?
is it a new angle on existing news?
does it link to other things such as current developments, issues and trends in society?

A new angle on existing news can revive a story that has already had exposure. It might come from a source with first-hand knowledge who was not previously known or who decided it is now time to speak up. A development on existing news might be a govenment legislating to prevent something already reported happening again. It might be new information coming from a continuing story.

Newsworthiness on social media: a contested issue

It gets more complicated in social media where the equivalent of not being newsworthy to a readership is for a post to be labelled ‘off-topic’. Rather than simply not read the offending item, readers sometimes demand its removal. It is then up to the social media admin to make the decision. Often, the admin makes the decision to remove it unilaterally. The risk here is that a small number of people assume the right to demand removal simply because they think it off-topic. Unless it is blatantly off-topic, not all will agree. I have seen quite a number of discussions on social media around the topicality of particular posts.

Here’s a real-world example. When someone posted an item in a facebook group, a few complained it was off-topic and demanded the admin take it down. A couple demanded the poster be excluded from the group. The item was not offensive in any way but it was marginal to the group. The poster replied that it might not be central to the group’s interests, however it had relevance. Others agreed. The admin let it stand. The simple solution would have been for the complainants to skip over the posting and not turn something trivial into a big issue. It demonstrated how a few loud voices can assume de-facto control unless other voices rise to counter them. The incident was a rather extreme overreaction that positioned the complainants as arbiters of what kind of content should be posted and who should be excluded from the group.

Provide context

It makes for fuller reporting to link incidents to their bigger context. Every story has a backstory. Every story comes from somewhere. Individuals stories exist within some bigger social trend, political policy development or other context.

We situate our story within this bigger context by mentioning it in our article. This offers a more-rounded understanding to readers who can see how the bigger picture gives rise to the incident we are reporting on and how the incident could influence the bigger picture context.

When homeless peoples occupied of Martin Place in Sydney CBD in early 2018, reports linked that to the issue of growing numbers of people living on the streets because of the lack of emergency accommodation. That linked to government failing to act on homelessness as the number of homeless grew.

Similarly, reporting on Australia’s national home affordability crisis in 2022 made links to a shortage of homes for rent or sale and to Reserve Bank interest rate increases further limiting home affordability. The reports could have limited their focus to the plight of individuals trying to find affordabile rental accommodation or houses for sale, a human interest approach that would be interesting in itself and answer the ‘what’ question about newsworthiness, however by linking to the bigger picture context of the situation with housing stock and monetary policy, reports provided answers to the ‘why’ question around the issue.

Beware normalisation

Continued discussion of a problem without posing a solution can lead to its normalisation. The problem becomes accepted as the norm not open to remedy.

As an example, continually focusing on the risks associated with a heating climate without moving on to discuss solutions reinforces the idea that those risks are the new normal and nothing can be done about them. This is the core of the argument over use of the terms ‘adaption’ and ‘amelioration’ in the conversation around global warming. Adaptation implies acceptance of continues warming and working out ways for societies to adapt to the changing circumtances. Amelioration implies taking political and social decisions to reduce the warming and does not imply acceptance of its worsening or continuing at the present rate. Amelioration implies finding solutions to reduce the warming while adaptation implies acceptance of the risks of continued warming.

Without looking at solutions we risk taking readers along the path of acceptance of unwanted outcomes by normalising them and of adopting a cynical attitude that is a barrier to effective action. This produces hopelessness and apathy and leaves those responsible for the worsening situation to continue what they are doing.

We see politicians cynically using normalisation when they continually repeat claims even when the claims are wrong. The tactic is that through repetition the claim will be publicly accepted as fact. This is why journalists, including citizen journalists, need to question what politicians say and do. Political decisions can affect all of us and are thus worthy of media scrutiny.

Offence

We look at offence in the legals section, but because it is used to try to silence criticism we will briefly visit it here.

As citizen journalists we do not deliberately set out to give offence. We recogonise, however, that giving and receiving offence comes with living in democratic societies with freedom of speech. Giving offence is not a crime unless, in Australia, it is made on the basis of ethnicity or some other characteristic proscribed in law. Some of those offended, however, will try to use their offence to stifle discussion of an issue and claim that what is really their personal sense of being offended is widely shared. Offence can thus become a rigger for attempted censorship.

As citizen journalists we are responsible for what we say but not for how people interpret it. We make the effort to make our writing and the captions to our photographs clear, however people interpret information through their own belief systems, values, assumptions and biases, and we have no control over that.

People are easily offended

You only have to look at social media to see how easily people are offended these days. Some respond vociferously, others by assuming victim status. This can be an attempt to garner sympathy and turn criticism of the imagined source of the offence.

Social media is where much offence takes place and where conversations can degenerate into name calling and accusations. Online commentary uses only a single channel of communication — words. Missing are tone and the non-verbal clues that are part of interpersonal communication. This makes it easy to misconstrue the intention of someone’s comment. Are they being offensive or rude, or are they plainly-spoken, direct people who come across as abrupt with no intention to offend?

At some time or other, in personal life and as well as in citizen journalism, we are going to give offence to some individual or group irrespective of whether we intend to or not. This can happen simply by questioning something about the group or even by writing about it. Similarly, we are likely to be offended by what some individual, politician, religion or other group says and does that contravenes our own beliefs and values or our work as citizen journalists. Offence is what happens in life and we should regard it as normal.

Individuals, social groups, genders, ethnicities and the religious are the main demographics to claim offence and will say so to defend themselves by directing accusation at and questioning the motives of the supposed offender. This sometimes takes the form of ad hominin rebuttal that attacks the motive, character or other personal attributes of the person making the argument rather than addressing the argument itself. It is an attempt to discredit the alleged offender.

Responses to perceived offence range through verbal attack, attempts to discredit journalists, verbal bullying, abuse, passive aggressive behaviours and emotional blackmail.

Public relations (PR) is not journalism

Whatever its form, public relations is about selling. It sells the reputations of people as well as products. Most of all, it is about perception. It is about convincing us of something. PR plays to our perceptions and values and seeks to shape them. It seeks to influence our belief about something

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda… Brian Eno.

Public relations people talk about how good something or someone is so as to influence public attitude to them. They might talk up something to sell it, to popularise it, to try to divert attention from it or to minimise damage to reputation or earnings through ‘crisis management’ when something goes wrong.

The public relations worker is the fellow-traveller of the marketer. This is not to imply all public relations people are evil. PR can be used for socially beneficial purposes, as can marketing.

PR people have no obligation to tell the whole story, to explain the pros and cons of a product, person or service. Thus, we should expect only partial information and partial truths from public relations.

Public relations is marketing. It is not journalism.

Allegation

We need to differentiate between allegation and fact.

an allegation is a claim about something that might or might not be true
a fact is true, it is what happened, what exists; there are no ‘alternative facts’; if an allegation is not true it is an error of judgement, a misapprehension or misunderstanding the result of faulty information, or it is a lie.

Mistaking allegation for fact is common, especially in social media. It happens when someone reads an allegation and then reposts it with a comment assuming it is fact.

In their work, citizen journalists identify allegation as such if they wish to retain credibility. If someone makes an allegation we look for evidence to verify or discount it. If we do not have that, we say it is allegation, not fact, and we attribute it to the person making it.