photo credit: Steve Rhodes http://www.flickr.com/photos/ari/131920107/
The definitive citizen journalist
We first met Josh Wolf many years ago in San Francisco when we were setting up Current TV.
We were looking for ‘volunteers’ for this radical new idea and Wolf was an enthusiastic early applicant.
On first meeting in a coffee shop off the Embarcadero, Wolf did not look like the steely living advocate of Citizen Journalism that he would become.
He looked like a drop out from my Bar Mitzvah class.
He wasn’t.
On August 1, 2006, Wolf was jailed by a Federal Court judge on August 1, 2006 for refusing to turn over a collection of videotapes he recorded during a July 2005 demonstration in San Francisco, California. Wolf served 226 days in prison at the Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin, California, longer than any other journalist in U.S. history has served for protecting source materials. With permission from the prosecution, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered Wolf’s release on April 3, 2007.
When Wolf videotaped the demonstration, he was not working for any ‘professional’ journalistic institution. He was working as a ‘Citizen Journalist’. But was a ‘journalist’?
I am taking this right from Wikipedia:
Questions of Wolf’s legitimacy as a journalist have been answered by support from various journalist groups. For example, In 2006, The Society of Professional Journalists awarded Josh Wolf with a Journalist of the Year award “for upholding the principles of a free and independent press.” Josh Wolf was the only journalist jailed for his professional activities in the United States in 2006, according to Committee to Protect Journalists [1] (this organization is a member of International Freedom of Expression Exchange). Support in the journalistic community is not uniform, however. On February 28, 2007, syndicated columnist Debra Saunders attacked the credibility of Wolf’s arguments, namely the lack of an expectation of privacy of those he was filming.
At the age of 27, Wolf is now a student a Berkeley University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
He may be a student, but he is still the inveterate VJ and Journalist.
SF Gate is reporting that Wolf is facing suspension from Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism for remaining in a student take-over of Wheeler Hall (Nov. 20). I get this story courtesy of Ken Kobre’s outstanding website, Kobrechannel. Wolf remained in the hall for 11 hours videotaping the incident. Now the school wants to suspend him.
The journalism faculty supports him, saying that his actions were completely correct as a journalist. The School of Journalism disagrees and has both suspended him and demanded that he write a 10-page essay answering questions such as “What are your limits as a journalist”?
I posted this yesterday on New York Video School, and elicited the following response from Wolf this morning:
Hey Michael,
Stumbled onto your blog post via Twitter. Thanks for writing it. If you could clarify one thing in the post it would be appreciated.
At the end of your piece you say that I must answer to the Dean of the j-school, and I feel that this sentence falsely implies that it is the journalism school behind the threat of suspension.
It is not the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism that moved to suspend me. The journalism school has not censured or punished any of the three j-school students who have been arrested at student protests this academic year in any way. In fact, the dean has written a letter to the Associate Dean of students opposing my suspension.
The Office of Student Conduct, an administrative department of the greater university brought the charges at the request of the UC Police Department.
I’d also like to add that I can’t disagree I only answer to myself at the end of the day. But like every other working journalist I must answer to the standards and policies of whatever publication I am working at it if I want to keep my job. As I did during my year at the Daily Post in Palo Alto (here’s a link to short doc about my job at the paper produced by Jason Sussberg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhW2uqDS0r8 ), but in this case the university feels that I am answerable a student first and journalist second. I am obviously a student of both the J-school and the University itself, but I feel that if I am in the good grace of the journalism school, I shouldn’t be living under the threat of suspension.
Best,
Josh
