The news from Iran: new research on how the Internet connected to the world media
Everybody likes to cite the Iranian protests as a great example of how the Internet and Social Media was able to bypass censorship and narrate a powerful, fast-shifting story to the world. But how much do we really know about what was happening online and how journalists outside of Iran connected to the Online information?
In this study for her dissertation at the LSE Media and Communications Department Claudia Schoenbohm looked at a range of news website and spoke to a group of online journalists to find out how they networked their coverage to the citizen journalism flooding out of Iran.
She has provided us with a rich analysis of the complex ways that the Iranian protests were told through these new sources for mainstream media. The interviews with journalists with journalists outside Iran show how they tried to verify the information and how it transformed their reporting.
In the final section Claudia analyses the democratic effect of this networked journalism and how it has blurred the distinction between mainstream and alternative media
The Protests In Iran: Evidence of Networked Journalism?
By Claudia Shoenboehm
Introduction
On June 12th, 2009, Iran’s 10th presidential election was held with incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad running against three opponents. The morning after, Iran’s official news agency, Islamic Republic News Agency, announced that Ahmadinejad had won the election with 62.6% of the votes cast, Mir Hossein Mousavi 33.8%, Mohsen Rezai 1.7% and Mehdi Karroubi 0.9%. Turnout was 85% with just under 40 million Iranians voting. Following the announcement of the presidential election, protests – which gathered the largest crowds since the Iranian Revolution in 1979 – took their malcontent with the results to the streets (BBC, June 22, 2009). Youths, families and young women wearing the traditional black chadors grouped together around the Interior Ministry, where the votes had been counted, as they simply did not believe the results. Their main demand was to annul the results and re-run the election (The Washington Post, June 14, 2009). Their discontent led them to use every possible tool available at the time to coordinate the protests and retell the events.
Twitter and YouTube, were of immense aid, not only to gather and coordinate street protests, but also to report the events inside Iran to the outside world (BBC News, June 17, 2009). As a result, 2,024,166 tweets about the Iranian election were recorded between June 7th and June 26th (Web Ecology Project, 2009), and 89,100 videos have been uploaded on YouTube to this point (YouTube, 2009). Consequently, the government blocked social networking sites. Yet citizens changed proxy servers and new proxy addresses were created to bypass censorship (BBC, June 17, 2009). The turmoil reached its momentum on June 20th, 2009, when Neda Agha-Soltan – a graduate from Islamic Azad University, where she had studied Islamic theology and secular philosophies – was shot while observing the main protests at some distance. Neda, whose name means ‘the voice’, became an instant icon representing the crisis, which unfolded from a political confrontation to several ominous physical clashes (The New York Times, June 22, 2009). A graphic amateur video displaying her death became an instantaneous phenomenon after appearing on social media sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook (The Washington Times, June 24, 2009), resulting in thousands of views and comments.
Soon after the results of the election were announced and the protests against the results began, U.S. news viewers complained against CNN’s failure to report the events on sites such as Twitter; since CNN’s veteran, Larry King, had interviewed motorcycle-builders instead. Yet, the so called traditional media quickly responded to the audience complaints and by June 16th, U.S. viewers received news on the Iranian events (Digits, June 15, 2009; The Economist, June 18, 2009).
The traditional role of the journalist has been to work as a gatekeeper, deciding what content ought to be included in the news production (Allan, 2009). Journalists, who work for corporate news organization, would thus control production by working as a filter for news items considered interesting, important and relevant for its readers. Yet with the arrival of the internet their role as a gatekeeper has weakened since the Internet offers virtually infinite column space and airtime. With the arrival of the internet, citizens have a direct access to sources. They change from being passive consumers of news to active producers. (Allan, 2006).
In this project, I will attempt to examine the role networked journalism has played in reporting the Iranian protests. My aim in the present research is to study the way changing patterns in the media landscape are represented by the different media sources in order to gain insight to the extent to which traditional media acknowledges that it relies on citizens to complete the news, at least, under certain political and social circumstances. In order to achieve this, I am taking several ‘voices’ from different online media sources, such as MSM online news, MSM blogs and independent blogs to analyse the discourses written on their websites. I am also attempting to provide a more consistent answer to my research questions and analysis by approaching several key stakeholders involved in the media. I will in turn set these findings in the broader context of journalism with the intention to observe the way the creation of news has evolved.
4. Results and Analysis
4.1. The Multidirectional Flow of Information
The representation of networked journalism was similar in all websites. All of them used user generated content, either from Twitter or YouTube, to collect information to complete the picture of the events. The sites included the amateur video showing the death of Neda, used a hyperlink to direct the reader to the video/tweets, or mentioned the video in the text to illustrate the relevance of the protests:
- “Amateur video footage of the 26-year-old woman bleeding on the street in Tehran has turned “Neda” into an international symbol of the protests against the reelection” (BB, 4-7)
- “Word on the street via one Iranian tweeter is that her name was Neda Agha Soltan. (…) Two clips below. The second you’ve already seen; the first is a new one circulating today, shot sometime before the moment of truth”“ (HA, 4-10)
- “A screengrab from a video uploaded to YouTube of a woman, referred to as Neda, dying after an apparent gunshot wound to her chest” (TL, 64, 65)
- “By now a lot of you have seen the video of the young Iranian girl who was host and killed (…) it’s the most graphic piece of video I’ve ever seen in my life” (DK, 7-12)
- “Frames from a YouTube video of Neda Agha-Soltan’s death. Opposition web sites and television channels have repeatedly aired the video” (NYT, 3, 4)
- “A gruesomely captivating video of a young woman – laid out on a Tehran street after apparently being shot, (…) swept Twitter, Facebook and other websites this weekend” (THP, 3-5)
It became clear that traditional journalism was not enough to report the events in Iran, and thus needed the aid from citizen journalism to complement the information what was missing. A few of the analysed websites encouraged citizens to share the information:
- “Readers inside Iran or in touch with people there are encouraged to send us photopraphs – our address is: pix@nyt.com – or use the comment box below to tell us what you are seeing or hearing” (TL)
- “I’m blogging the latest Iran election fallout. Email me with any news or thoughts, or follow me on Twitter. Send me instant messages at nico.pitney@gm.”( THP)
What can be interpreted from the two quotes above is that the sources, when in need for information, highlighted the most relevant parts of the text in different ways to capture the readers’ attention. As the case of TL, certain parts of the text were highlighted in bold font in and would also direct readers directly to the place they were able to share what they had witnessed via hyperlinks. THP would stress the importance of obtaining information from citizens constantly since it said “instant messages”. Furthermore, both quotes gave alternative ways for readers to send content, which is another way to THP placed the request to readers to send information at the top of the site. These strategies were used to capture readers’ attention. On that note, Matlin (2003) stated that items presented either at the beginning – the primacy effect – or at the end of a sequence – the recency effect – are better recalled and capture the attention of the listener/reader’s working memory than those items in the middle of a sequence.
That information, produced by citizens, was travelling between the so called nodes, i.e. between the different platforms, became apparent via different “behaviours”. First, all websites posted one or more amateur videos of either Neda’s death or her presumed grave, which were mostly taken from YouTube. Second, several used hyperlinks to take readers to the original source or direct them to other sites of information. This was particularly the case of TL (26, 27, 61), THP (15, 37) and DK (33). Hyperlinks, according to Allan (2006), have been a standard feature of blogs to look for content relevant to include for commentary and discussion. This feature, Allan (2006) reasoned, would allow for the sharing of information and would send users to other sites across the web. At the same time, using hyperlinks is already a means to enhance the news available elsewhere on the web, and is of aid for readers to manage the vast ecology of information on the web (Allan, 2006). Third, TL would, for instance, include comments written by readers in Tehran on Tehran Bureau’s Twitter feed (30-39), which demonstrated that those comments travelled from one platform or node to another. Moreover, as the example shown above illustrates, Nico Pitney encouraged readers to send him information via different channels: Twitter, email or instant messages. This “behaviour” reflects the diverse channels through which information flowed and that authors reporting the news sought as many routes as possible. This was not only the case of established blogs such as The Huffington Post, but was also seen in the MSM. The New York Times made use of Facebook to seek information about an anonymous doctor who said to have tried to save Neda: “On a Facebook posting along with the video an anonymous doctor said he tried to save her but failed because the bullet hit her heart” (NYT, 68). Furthermore, the diverse directions information was transmitted was also observed in the post added by Hot Air. The source noted that “A Farsi speaker tells HuffPo that this blogger is claiming that Neda was at the protest with her professor”. Hence, we have four different nodes: Hot Air, the Farsi speaker, The Huffington Post and the blogger. The latter, fmortaz.blogspot.com, was in this case the starting point from where that information travelled on to different sites. It was then picked up by the Farsi speaker who alerted The Huffington Post about where to find relevant information about Neda’s location before her death. Ultimately, the Hot Air not only quoted The Huffington Post’s blog post but the blogger’s post too.
Information, as Nathan Hodge said, is at heart of the production of news stories. Yet in case of closed societies, such as Iran, information is at times difficult to obtain due to governmental restriction. The majority of interviewees acknowledged the latter point and stressed the importance of citizen journalism. Ruth Barnett said, “when information is scarce, like we saw in Iran, it can be a way of complementing what else they are doing.” Nico Pitney added “it just provided so much more information. What we were doing, at the Huffington Post, I call community news gathering because there is more information out there on a big event like this than any one person can track down. It really does take a dozens of people working together, to put pieces together, the information out there. And even then a lot gets missed.”
4.2. The Mainstream and Alternative Media
Yet Ruth Barnett’s statement “And obviously it doesn’t replace our normal news-gathering of these kinds of stories, and we also try to have people out there, places, or our official sources. (…) complementing what else they are doing” reveals that as much as MSM used AM as a source to fill the holes of missing information, MSM would still claim having the supremacy. The way the events were reported on all sites reflected how hybrid news reporting can become, yet the MSM would not give away its professionalism. A continuum line between ‘traditional journalism’ and ‘citizen journalism’ was identified. MSM news sites, such as the NYT, would strive towards the ‘traditional journalism end’, while independent blogs such as HA and DK would fall under the ‘citizen journalism’ end. Atton (2002) noted that there is a difference between AM and MSM in the selection of the sources they use to report news stories. For instance, Allan (2006) noted that usually blogs make more use of alternative platforms than MSM news sites. Furthermore, the way the analysed sites selected certain sources of information differed greatly. MSM news sites, such as the NYT, would use less AM and MSM sources of information and hyperlinks compared to TL, HA, DK, THP. Nevertheless, the NYT used the YouTube video portraying Neda’s death at the beginning of the article (3, 4, 22), it hyperlinked opposition candidate Medhi Karroubi’s website, and it also hyperlinked a Wikipedia entry (57) as well as Facebook (68). Thus, compared to MSM blogs and independent blogs, the NYT used fewer sources outside the organisation, but it would still make use of the most relevant alternative sources in order to build their argument. On the other hand, except for the Times mention by HA, DK and HA would mainly refer to alternative sources when writing about Neda’s death. However, TL and THP would fall somewhere in between traditional and citizen journalism as they heavily used all kind of sources. The Lede, for instance, would use a combination of sources such as Reuters (20), BBC (26), Twitter (30), YouTube (58), Time.com (70), Newsweek (77-79), and Reporters Without Borders (81-86). However, one would assume that MSM blogs would only cite news organisations also belonging to the same media group as it would be the case of Time Magazine because it is owned by The New York Times Company. But as TL showed, it would even include hyperlinks to competing news organisations as the BBC and Newsweek. Several of BBC’s videos, which were cited by TL, showed amateur videos reporting the protests (26, 139, 140, 153, 154). According to Allan (2006), due to commercial reasons, MSM news sites would generally refrain from using hyperlinks in order for readers to continue to remain on the site and not to lose their loyalty.
Furthermore, there was a difference noted between the NYT and the TL. The latter would include a much wider range of voices than the news organisations’ news section. This finding would thus agree, at least to some extend, with Atton and Hamilton (2008) who stated that AM make more use of diverse voices such as local communities, protesters and activists than MSM, which would concentrate on citing members of elite groups. Yet, even the MSM made use of alternative sources of information but in less quantity. In addition, TL seemed more approachable than the NYT’s news section because of a number of reasons. First, TL asked readers to send photographs and share any information they had seen or heard. Second, it thanked its readers for sending their comments and links (15).
Moreover, even though TL stated that the NYT updated its main news article on their website continuously (8, 9), TL itself was updated no longer than every 30 minutes. The same was observed with THP, which also updated the site on the Iranian events about every 20 minutes. Deuze (2005) stated that MSM journalists would aim to deliver information instantly and immediately, but the same can be said about TL and THP. This could be attributed to the characteristics of the internet. According to Castells (2009) and Giddens (1990), new technologies such as the Internet have had an impact on the notion of time and space in modern society. Therefore, the scholars noted that information travels much faster across time and space since everyone seems to be connected across the globe. On that note, Nathan Hodge said “I think that the great thing is the immediacy of citizen journalism, and the fact that very often reporters can be limited, especially in places like Iran, by restrictions on the press.” At the same time, Nathan Hodge and Martyn Hocking noted that the immediacy of the information is not only due to the characteristics of the internet, but also because technology, as in case of the mobile phone, is very much embedded in people’s everyday life. Both referred to the uploading of amateur pictures and videos taken by people on their mobile phones during the London bombings in 2005. Nathan Hodge stated: “people were able to upload cell-phone videos very quickly. And it is a good way that people can get immediate information, and that is the whole point of news.” Martyn Hocking added that, “it became
clear that the consumer was telling the story rather the journalist (…) because clearly
there was footage from mobile phones which people, who were on the train, were able to
release to the media, YouTube, etc. Because it was so time-sensitive – A: they had it
before everyone else. B: They had information no one else could recreate. (…) and that is a fantastic source of news that you wouldn’t otherwise been received and used in that immediacy. (…) In my view that is entirely positive, because there isn’t anything a
journalist can add to that story, which the person couldn’t tell you as an eyewitness
themselves”.
4.3. The Reliability of Information
Even though user generated content was used by the six analysed sources, the uncertainty remained about its reliability. There were several techniques employed by all sources except for the NYT. For instance, they would make use of certain adverbs and adjectives:
- “A bit more on Neda. A blogger apparently in touch with Neda’s family” (THP, 15)
- “Another reader sends an unconfirmed report of a memorial service for Neda” (THP, 33)
- “Photograph reportedly showing Neda Agha-Soltan’s grave surfaces on Twitpic” (BB, 1,2)
- “This photograph purporting to show the grave of Neda” (BB, 3)
- “A Farsi speaker tells HuffPo that this blogger is claiming that Neda was at the protest” (HA, 17, 18)
The sources also warned readers about the validity of the content when stating:
- “Please keep in mind that NOTHING in this story can be verified, so read it with that in mind. I am not reporting anything as fact, I’m just posting what I’ve found.” (DK, 5, 6)
- “The rumour – and it’s all rumour until some newspaper tracks down her family – is that she was 27 years old” (HA, 6, 7)
Thus, the examples above demonstrate that although all sources used alternative channels to reconstruct the events and deliver the news to readers, the reliability of the content was still questioned. Ruth Barnett noted that Twitter and YouTube were another way of having an eyewitness account to report the protests in Iran and were treated similar to the content sent by individuals to the newsroom in the past. However, she said that there was a difference between YouTube and Twitter concerning the reliability of user generated content. She noted that because YouTube entails visual cues it is easier to identify whether what it is shown on the video really happened since it would also be embedded in a certain context; while it would take longer to search through the various tweets and track those down which would persistently report on the events. On that note, Nathan Hodge stated, “with YouTube (…) there is no substitute for reporting on the ground. If you are covering an event like that; simply what you have to do is try to go first hand, if you are not there, witnessing someone being injured or killed, you go to the hospital or to the morgue, that’s where journalists typically go to verify these reports. Check with doctors who treated people. Again, it is a way, if you are not there, to get some visual, get some reporting stuff, post something to your site. But there is a huge difference between being there and covering from the distance. Again, it is great to have the tools, but there is no substitute for being there.” On the other hand, after reporting the events for a longer period of time, Nico Pitney commented that “you do get a sense after a while what sources on Twitter are reliable which sources on YouTube are reliably posting the information. Once you get that sense it makes future judgements about the material much quicker. You don’t have to double source everything because you trust someone.””
5. Discussion and Conclusion
5.1 Networked Journalism: A Multidirectional Communication
The CDA of the six websites as well as the interviews revealed that without the information sent by citizens inside Iran – particularly the content posted on AM channels such as Twitter and YouTube – a compelling account about the protests in Iran would not have been possible. Citizen journalism was not only used mainly by AM sources, such as The Huffington Post, but it was also of great importance for MSM news organisations to report on the events on their news sites as well as blogs. Furthermore, CDA of websites revealed that especially MSM blogs such as The Lede and The Huffington Post used an array of sources to fill in the gaps of missing information. They would do so by updating the site throughout the day which, according to Deuze (2005), serves one of the core values of journalism – the immediacy of news.
The fact that all these different nodes, i.e. The New York Times news section, The Lede, The Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Hot Air, Babylon & Beyond, made use of user generated content from various places illustrated the impact the Internet has had on traditional as well as citizen journalism. Information coming from Twitter, for instance, spread in real time (AP, June 15, 2009) across two networks, the Internet and SMS, which can be received and read on anything with a screen and a network connection (Time, June 17, 2009). Adding to all this, as noted in the literature review, the increasing adoption of the Internet and the mobile phones in Iran have enabled Iranian citizens to send and receive information. They were able to do this even after the government had banned AM channels (AP, June 15, 2009) by manipulating proxy servers (BBC, June 17, 2009). This provides further evidence to Jenkins (2006) notion of media convergence which stated that in the participatory culture, media consumers “are fighting for the right to participate more fully in their culture” (pp. 18). Consequently, this would mean that the traditional top-down corporate-driven process is reversed, at least in some instances, to a bottom-up consumer-driven process. In case of the Iranian protests, citizens used different media platforms to make themselves heard and send information to Western news organisations. By doing so, the traditional vertical flow of information from media conglomerates to consumers (Thompson, 1995) was broken down to become multidirectional, since information travelled between multiple nodes in real time. More importantly, as Castells (2009) stated, nodes can be activated at anytime and anywhere for new nodes to play an important role in the network. Twitter, a recently new social media site, played a key role to convey information outside Iran, but in the future other media platforms could emerge and play an equally important role on news production.
In addition, with the amount of information travelling across the Internet, traditional journalism – as seen with the NYT which used sources such as YouTube and Facebook – has changed to adopt the role of gatewatchers. On that note, Kevin Anderson commented,” What is intriguing about both the London bombings in 2005 and the protests in Iran, is that because people are immersed in media, they actually demonstrate a lot of the same techniques that journalists would use. One of the classic images of July 05 shows someone taking a picture of their watch to document the time at which the bombings had happened. There are a lot of opportunities for journalists to find interesting content but I think that even more so to find interesting sources right now.” Moreover, according to Ruth Barnett, “There are always going to be changes and there are always going to be technologies and we’ve always seen that in journalism. (…) We certainly try and engage in that rather than pretend it is not happening. We try to integrate some of these people, like bloggers. I think it can be part of it. “Therefore, when it came to obtaining information, even the MSM sources would adopt a networked journalistic practice in order to achieve the best possible new story. The fact that the NYT used new media to get hold of information, is an example of what Beckett (2008) called networked journalism. Beckett (2008) claimed that journalism should exploit the new conditions presented by new media. Thus, he reasoned that in terms of the production process of news, journalists should become familiar with alternative platforms such as social networking sites since these platforms allow individuals to feel part of something. By doing so, he said that journalists would increasingly become facilitators. The concept of “facilitator” overlaps to some extend with Bruns (2007) concept of the “gatewatcher”. According to both authors, the journalist complements its first-hand investigative research with research on information in the online environment which unfolds at the same time. Therefore, by including citizen journalism into the process of news production, MSM brings in participants into the network. Therefore, I agree with The Economist (June 18, 2009) which stated that “the winner of the Iranian protests was neither old media nor new media, but a hybrid of the two”. The fact that new media was included by old media, i.e. networked journalism, was possible because of the characteristics the Internet has. On that note, Sarikakis (2006) claimed, “beyond a medium of communication, the internet represents a very particular and significant technology where interactivity and the building of networks constitute probably its most exciting traits. Speed and borderlessness turn the internet into a supermedium of contemporary times. Most importantly perhaps, it is the dynamic infrastructure of the internet that is based on decentralized communication nodes and points of entry into already existent spaces”. (pp.164)
However, as much as citizen journalism was relevant to complete the picture, it was clear that the validity of information was always at stake. User generated content was thus not negatively regarded by journalists, but as Nathan Hodge noted “And of course the thing you have to keep in mind, is that, especially if you are talking about taking things from Twitter, you are not there to check them. So you can’t hang an entire story on what people are saying based on Twitter, they may be writing it from Los Angeles, for all you know. So you have to take everything that you pick up with a grain of salt. But the volume of traffic gives a pretty good indication of what people are saying.” In case the source was not able to verify the content, Ruth Barnett stated that “the important thing is to be clear with the audience about where we got information and how much we were able to clarify it ourselves.” As seen in the analysis the different sites would use different strategies to draw readers’ attention about the validity of the information.
As the case of the Iranian protests has further shown, alternative media is not necessarily about radical content being published; Twitter and YouTube in this instance were used to inform the world outside Iran about the events, and subsequently contributed to the process of news production. This does not mean that the protests were not violent and that they had a revolutionary cause with the aim to introduce political changes; yet for from the media perspective, the use of Twitter and YouTube as mediums to send the information is revolutionary on its own. The example of Iran illustrates the ground-breaking changes the media and communication landscape is constantly undergoing.
But what effects has the networked society/journalism had on the media on the whole?
5.2. The Democratization of the Media and Public Opinion
The way alternative mediums were used by Iranian citizens to report on the development of the protests showed that the media gave way for democratic practices. As Cammaerts and Carpentier (2006) claimed, media themselves are not just passively expressing or mirroring a social phenomena or where discourses simply circulate. Instead, as seen with Twitter, YouTube, and blogs, they were key players in the democratic process, since the media allowed for citizen participation to shape public opinion and inform MSM. The fact that Iranian citizens participated in public discourses agrees with Habermas (1989) concept of the public sphere because Iranians not only gathered offline but also online to discuss the presidential election results. According to Habermas (1989), people would leave the private sphere to gather in the public sphere to discuss public matters. Although he strongly criticised the media for becoming a mass medium to entertain and satisfy consumer’s needs, thus becoming homogeneous, the way communication tools were used in this event proved the opposite. Citizens raised their voice and exchanged their thoughts not only within but outside Iran as well. Hence, alternative platforms were used to exchange information in real time, which was used for a political action and not for consumption purposes. The use of media platforms to shape public opinion and send information across the globe speaks in favour of the concept of communication rights proposed by UNESCO. The right to communicate was at hart at the centre of the UNESCO debates concerning the New World Information and Communication Order as well as the plea for a “free and balanced flow of information” (Cammaerts and Carpentier, 2006).
5.3. The Blurred Boundaries between Mainstream and Alternative Media
The MSM made emphasis that they are still more established than AM sources concerning its professionalism when producing news stories on several instances. Ruth Barnett stated “It is an addition to the way that we use the more traditional sources. Sometimes it capturing good case studies, people were giving us an indication of what we should look into. (…) But I think that what we have seen is that people still want to read news from an established news organisation that they trust for that information.” And as TL wrote at the beginning of its post To supplement reporting by New York Times journalists inside Iran on Sunday, The Lede will continue to track the aftermath of Iran’s disputed presidential election, as we have for the last several days” Hence, MSM sources would regard AM channels such as Twitter and their own blog as an additional source of obtaining information, which would not interfere with its professionalism.
CDA showed that the boundaries of all three groups, MSM news sites, MSM blogs, and independent blogs are to some extend blurred due to several features. First, the content they presented was similar, as it was the case of representing Neda’s death. They all made use of several platforms, such as social network sites, in order to obtain eyewitness accounts. It follows that the selection of content was fairly similar across all groups. Regarding the representation about the media landscape observed on all of these three groups was not distinctively different. For instance, all showed that the traditional sender-receiver relationship of content had been altered with the introduction of the Internet, allowing “for the unique and novel contributions of citizens’ media to media production and distribution” (Rodriguez, 2001, pp.47).
5.4. Political Economy
When I asked Jerry Seib whether AM could be seen as a competition for MSM he replied: “There is no doubt that there is competition to mainstream journalism. There are now ways for regular citizens and for amateur news people, to simply start posting things
on the internet. And they are not bound by the same kinds of professional and ethical obligations that mainstream journalists face. If you are professional you assume a particular obligation to make sure that you are fair and accurate. You assume an obligation to give both sides of the story. You assume an obligation not to sensationalise. None of these obligations apply to citizen journalism, posting stuff, tweeting it, going online and saying whatever it is that comes to mind. Yet, in
particular in case of Iran, the people, who are not professionally constrained are posting
things and providing information that is enormously attractive to people who just want to get a sense of what is going on in places it is hard to get to. So, the competition in my mind is between those who are compelled to be more careful and those who have no
particular bounds on what to say or what they do online. (…) The reality is that it
represents not just competition, but an environment which people simply want to have, and now expect to have, information as fast as humanly possible.” It follows that the competition was concerned, as in case of Iran, with the speed with which different sources or nodes were able to get hold of reliable information. But, as Nathan Hodge noted, AM could pose a potential thread for established news organisations to run the business: “The only concern really is preserving the viability of the news industry in business – that is what gives us our independence at the end of the day. And if the arrival of social media and other new ways of getting information are ruining the profitability of traditional outlets, it makes it much more difficult to fund and finance reporting in difficult places such as Iran, Georgia, Afghanistan. It is not easy to get very costly reporting, as you have to consider travel costs, insurance, equipment and there is just no substitute, like I said at the beginning, of being on the ground.” The news business generally has been greatly hit with the arrival of the Internet, not only because people can seek news stories outside MSM outlets, but also because people have increasingly been indulged with obtaining free information (The New York Times, August 17, 2009). However, as the Financial Times has shown, readers are willing to pay for reliable and professional content since readers were willing to pay for an online subscription (The New York Times, August, 17, 2009). “My hope and my belief in the long run, people are smart and they will be able to or probably have already figured how to sort out on the internet things that are reliable (…) and that mainstream journalists have to be careful not to sacrifice their standards in this world because ultimately the reason to go to a mainstream journalist news organisation, online or print, is because you can actually rely on the information you get there,” Jerry Seib noted.
5.5. Conclusion
To conclude, I borrow Atton and Hamilton (2008) claims about the effect AM has had on MSM since they explain the way AM has influenced the process of producing news stories as it was the case of Iran. According to both scholars, “the media themselves are a social process organised in space and therefore may be challenged by other kinds of social process. Amateur media producers play an important role here. They show that it is possible to re-imagine journalism and that there are other ways of practicing it beyond its dominant forms.” (pp. 124). “Rather than relying on the mass media to set the boundaries of political involvement, citizens use their own terms. To become an active participant in the process of media production is a political education in itself. Amateur media practices are always embedded in everyday life practices; they are therefore already located in broader political, economic, social and cultural contexts” (pp. 123).
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