A recent long feature in the New Yorker took up the debate about "citizen journalism"--the internet-enabled coverage of events and ideas by the countless amateurs on the ground. Nick Lemann argues that far from being the pathbreaking eventual replacement for establishment news providers, citizen journalism never equals actual journalism and never will. "The content of most citizen journalism will be familiar to anybody who has ever read a church or community newsletter," and none of it "yet rises to the level of a journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the old media--to function as a replacement rather than an addendum."

Lemann closes with: "Journalism is not in a period of maximal self-confidence right now, and the Internet's cheerleaders are practically laboratory specimens of maximal self-confidence.... As of now, though, there is not much relation between claims for the possibilities inherent in journalist-free journalism and what the people engaged in that pursuit are actually producing. As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away."

I've got no quarrel with Lemann's general assessment of citizen journalism to date, but I differ with the way he frames the debate. Three observations come to mind.

1)    No medium vanishes. A media-consultant pal, Peter Kreisky (you can see his website here), likes to say that no medium ever totally disappears. As new media possibilities arise, each finds its highest and best use and every other medium jostles around a bit to find its remaining, presumably smaller, niche. Stone tablets are still used for cornerstones and gravestones. Journalism, with its rules of evidence and fairness and editorial brands, isn't going to vanish, no matter what the web does to it--so the outcome isn't binary.

2)   It's not us-vs.-them. That binary assumption is an investigative dead end. And it shows up in several aspects of the citizen journalism debate. (I'm not picking on just Lemann here; this is true about the debate generally.) Like most assessments of online journalism this article presents the schism as us-vs.-them, and asks which kind of "journalism" is better--so what we're left with is thesis and antithesis but no synthesis. Yet, as Kreisky is pointing out, synthesis will happen. Citizen journalism will take its place alongside professional journalism in the infosphere. Connectivity will in fact turn out to be a boost for both kinds of journalism. We’re seeing this already, as the Washington Post, for example, reports on and hosts blogs.

3)   Sensing, Editing, Action. To anticipate what the synthesis might be, let’s deconstruct the journalistic process that is discussed in the New Yorker piece, and divide it into sensing, editing, and action. Citizen journalism's has an enormous advantage in sensing. Anyone on the ground can report a spotting of excessive effluent emission or any other event—so the web can become what John Seely Brown called a “giant retina stretched over the planet,” and can be present in places and at times when professional journalism can’t, the more so as news organizations shrink their overseas bureaus and can afford fewer, not more, sensors.

And the editing step, applying perspective and priorities to the flood of potential news? Is that up to the consumers of news, choosing their RSS feeds and structuring their Google home pages, or to the Editor-in-Chief? Still an open question. It is clear that in today’s web environment all kinds of conspiracy theories and other conclusions get created that would be better left unpublicized, although there are exceptions. Think of that infamously problematic Intel chip and how it was pinned down by mathematicians who actually amassed the data to demonstrate it was flawed--an example of fact checking and story verification that would have been extremely slow and difficult through traditional means.

Then there's action. On the one hand, the influential traditional media have so much potential to create action that, I would argue, they don’t use it. They’re scared to use it. To be fair, they don’t see themselves as in business to change the world. But citizen journalism, Lemann argues, doesn't even have that action-prompting power in the first place. He notes the two often-cited examples of bloggers taking down Dan Rather's report on Bush's National Guard service and also bringing down Trent Lott by reporting his thoughts about the days of Jim Crow. According to Lemann, "It ought to raise suspicion that we so often hear the same menu of examples in support of [citizen journalism's] achievements." But don't the examples actually prove the opposite point? That these two highly improbable things happened might equally be an indication that action is possible through online avenues that would never have happened through traditional journalism--and that is a good capability. How often “should” these things happen to validate this on-line activism?

Where will citizen journalism--or old-school journalism, for that matter--end up? I don't know. (And I don't trust anyone who says he does.) But I know it's not thesis or antithesis. I know it will be synthesis. I know it will be something altogether new. I hope Lemann’s next feature inventories the emerging links between the two forms, not the arguments between them, so that we can begin to see how networked journalism will evolve.