Week 8: Citizen Journalism

I just spent some time showing some friends of mine Josh Farro’s exit letter from Paramore, which contained some pretty juicy personal attacks on frontwoman Hayley Williams, management at Atlantic Records and Hayley’s family. I found the blog through reading MTV’s news updates, which also provided a comments section at the end. MTV gave a breakdown and a limited description of what Farro had said and its ramification, but the most insightful observations and evaluations of the situation, in my opinion, came from people commenting. I personally thought a lot of what Farro had said was inappropriately personal and out-of-line with his ‘nice guy’ persona. It seemed like MTV agreed with me , but didn’t explicitly say so.

I think this is where the whole idea of gatewatching versus gatekeeping that was discussed in the lecture comes in. From what I’ve gathered from lectures in this subject and I guess throughout my entire degree, I’ve learnt that the media are, among other things, designed to be the gatekeepers of what’s happening in the society that they are covering. They are supposed to watch out for events and political decisions that could have ramifications. They are supposed to report, research, explain and evaluate things that have bearing on their audience. More and more, though, it seems that traditional media outlets are just…reporting. I would argue that this is a partly a straight cultural change in news preference and partly a move to avoid litigation for defamation, but it seems like the readers are the ones making the hard calls and really saying what they think is happening. I guess this is where citizen journalism in the ‘new system’ that Ted talked in the lecture about comes in—saying what outlets caught up in the old system are no longer willing to say.