The BBC Begins to Embrace The Citizen Journalist

Still the best news organization in the world.

My friend, Pat Younge, former President of The Travel Channel, now Chief Creative Officer at The BBC, sends me link this morning to an article in The Guardian, about The BBC’s slow embrace of Citizen Journalism.

The BBC is going to start working closely with nonprofit blogging network Global Voices Online

Global Voices will put one of their folks in the BBC newsroom and The BBC will put one of their people inside Global Voices.

The idea that citizen journalism is somehow opposed to, or in conflict with, traditional journalism is now clearly past. It’s evident that both exist in a symbiotic relationship with one another, with many opportunities to collaborate on the creation of news, storytelling and distribution of content,” said Global Voices’s executive director, Ivan Sigal, about the project.

This is, I think, a very positive move forward.

When it comes to journalism, everyone is a journalist.

That is, in fact, what the First Amendment (though it does not really apply to The BBC, being British) is all about.

That is why we don’t license journalists in this country, as they do in many other countries. Because everyone has not only a right, but indeed a responsibility to be a journalist.

That is what a Free Press is really all about. It is not free for Rupert Murdoch. He does not need a free press. It is free for the rest of us, as a Constitutionally guaranteed right.

Is there value to what Citizen Journalists have to say? (Is there value to what traditional journalists have to say?). Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

But it is up to us to decide what we like and what we don’t, not some government agency.

That is also what a Free Press is all about.

After all, Tom Paine, author of Common Sense, was a Citizen Journalist – and not too popular with The British Crown.  Given the choice, they would have gladly suppressed what he wrote – as a non-professional.

And now The BBC, the crown jewel of journalism globally, is starting a slow dance with Citizen Journalism.

As Peter Horricks, the new Director of BBC Global News notes

Horrocks said that technology was changing journalism, adding that it was important for the BBC to leave a programme-based mindset behind and adapt to new technologies.

Well Bravo to the BBC.

in 2000 they hired me to train 750 of their journalists as working VJs.

Last week, ABC News announced that, ten year later, they would follow The BBC’s lead.

Now, The BBC once again sets the path.

I expect that the US networks will follow in about a decade.