iReport At The Core Or Not?

Bill Barol
Buzz, Boom & Sizzle




TECHNOLOGY

CNN’s iReports: Like News, But With An Asterisk

Aug. 1 2011 - 3:37 pm

I really want to believe Lila King, participation director at CNN Digital, went off the reservation when she said this: iReporters, King told Beet.TV, “are now at the core of the way we tell most big breaking news stories.”

Really? The core of it? What’s going on at CNN, anyway? Certainly, changes are afoot. New executive VP/managing editor Mark Whitaker was quoted recently to the effect that Anderson Cooper is his model of what a CNN anchor ought to be going forward. This offers a good insight into where the cable newsers are moving, and however you may feel about Cooper it’s not a crazy proposition.You want to friendly up your news product, you could do worse than Cooper, who has both a human, relatable style and some reporting chops. It’s a far cry, though, from this to a model in which the contributions of untrained, untested “citizen journalists” are “at the core” of a major news organization’s work product.

This is particularly, egregiously true when those contributions are unvetted. King offers the lame disclaimer that iReport content to which journalistic due diligence hasn’t been applied by the network is always clearly identified. But what does this say about the banner of CNN, and how CNN itself perceives the worth of its brand? Inclusion under that banner, whether it’s via CNN or CNN Digital, implies an endorsement of sorts. It simply isn’t good enough to say that this information is worthy of CNN’s professional standards while this information isn’t, and is broadcast with what amounts to an asterisk and a waiver. You either apply professional standards or you don’t. If you do, however vibrant and liberating a phenomenon “citizen journalism” may be, it can’t be at the core of your coverage. Not if you’re serious about being “the most trusted name in news.”

So here’s hoping King was just caught up in the giddiness of the iReport program’s fifth birthday. (Hey, they’re mailing party packs to anniversary gatherings all over the world, with T-shirts and stuff!!!) Because if she was speaking for the network, the network has some explaining to do.

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Peter's 10 Cents:

I may be wrong, but when CNN began announcing the importance of the amateurs' iReports I understood that those general-public videos/reports would be a basis for a bit of news that otherwise would go unnoticed; but that the iReport video would be only the start of the news item, that if the CNN administration decided that it was a worth piece of news, the main reporters would take it from there and developed the iReport and converted it into a big piece of news.

For example, if an iReport comes in about a kitten stuck in a street main drain and was saved by the local fire department guys, well, then it was just that, an iReport with a bit of nice, cute news. But! If the iReport was about a fight between the police and a group of LEGAL Mexican immigrants who were being harassed by the cops, then CNN would send its reporter and crew to investigate and report.

Small iReport, show it. Important iReport, investigate and report about it professionally. But I may not be wrong...