Journalism is easy, is it not? Surely anyone can do it. After all, what is so special about writing down what you see and hear? How difficult is it to take a photograph of what is in front of you? There is a growing conviction that nothing is beyond the "ordinary person in the street," itself a meretricious description that is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
People can become overnight stars, courtesy of reality TV, and instant millionaires, courtesy of the lottery. They can make their own films, courtesy of cheap video cameras. They can travel the world dressed in clothes designed by couturiers while enjoying meals in the finest restaurants. A combination of education, affluence and technology has allowed people to hurdle the traditional barriers erected by an elite that previously insulated itself from the masses at both work and play.
One restriction under persistent attack is "professionalism," the notion that a job entails lengthy and sophisticated training that closes it off to "ordinary" mortals. This may well continue to be true of medicine and the law -- though both have had to adapt in the face of the modern democratic spirit -- but it has never carried much weight in journalism. It has long been the case in the UK, especially since the National Union of Journalists lost its 1970s battle for a closed shop, that untrained people have walked into jobs in newspapers and broadcasting.
Now, with the Internet, there has been a further step-change in what it means to be a journalist because the old media organizations, especially newspapers, cannot regulate entry. Indeed, they are now desperately playing catch-up, trying to cope with the net's apparently limitless possibilities.
First, there was the blogging phenomenon, with people offering first-person, eyewitness accounts of events that either contradicted reporters' accounts or, more usually, offered a more penetrating, if limited, insight.
Running more or less in parallel came the photographic bloggers, people putting their pictures online for everyone to see. The success of this new journalism was illustrated by videos of the Boxing Day tsunami and was even more notable during London's July 7 bombing ordeal when dramatic cellphone images -- still and video -- appeared on the Internet within minutes of being taken. Then, following the aborted bombings two weeks later, came video footage of the arrest of an alleged bomber.
Suddenly, everyone was talking about "citizen journalists," arguing that the uncommercialized net, free from elite professional control and vested interests, offered an unrivaled way of people both transmitting and receiving the unvarnished truth.
It is not as simple as that, of course. The detached journalistic professional is still necessary, whether to add all-important context to explain the blogs and the thousands of images, or simply to edit the material so that readers and viewers can speedily absorb what has happened. There are other important considerations, too, not least resolving knotty contradictions between freedom and commercialism, and between citizenship and consumerism.
The spirit of freedom is characterized by flickr.com, a Web site used by hundreds of people on July 7 to upload their pictures of commuters struggling through smoke-filled tube tunnels in the aftermath of the suicide bombings. Stewart Butterfield, an executive at the Canada-based site, says: "We are committed to helping people to give their stuff away for free."
But last week, a Scotland-based Web site, scoopt.com, was launched with a very different ambition: to act as a middleman to negotiate deals with newspapers and magazines on behalf of people who take pictures.
One of its founders, Kyle MacRae, says: "I realized that amateurs who take newsworthy pictures needed help in dealing with the mainstream media. They should be able to make money for their photographs and videos."
He wants people to register and, should they take a picture in future that is saleable, scoopt will negotiate fees with picture editors at newspapers and magazines, taking 50 percent for its trouble. It probably helps that one of MacRae's partners is picture editor on a Scottish paper, though he does not wish to be identified.
Does MacRae not feel this commercial activity betrays the Internet's original anti-corporate concept of freedom?
"That's a fine and noble philosophical ideal," he says. "And, if that's your bag, fine. If people want to share their pictures for free, that's OK. But we're acting for people who think otherwise."
Butterfield is also untroubled by the scoopt initiative.
"We are not philosophically opposed to people making money from their photos," he says. "We don't feel that people who want to sell their `work' are morally inferior. The bottom line is that we're libertarian."
Gareth Potter, who uploaded 76 pictures to flickr after the London bombings, says the scoopt idea "looks rather tempting. It would be great to have one's photo published in the mainstream media."
But there are ethical questions about the growth of what scoopt calls "the snaparazzi" (an interesting variation on the more high-minded label of citizen journalists).
The Chartered Institute of Journalists believes the media's use of amateur pictures borders on irresponsible and that people may place themselves at risk by training their cameras on news events, for example by rushing towards fires.
It is especially exercised by ITV's London Tonight, which has appealed to viewers to take part in what it calls "the exciting world of newsgathering." But, asks the institute, "What happens if a viewer is seriously injured while taking part? Will ITV be there to pick up the pieces and pay the medical bills?"
It also points out that broadcasters appear to want footage without paying for the rights, a situation that scoopt is obviously ready to remedy. MacRea is equally concerned about people putting themselves in danger.
"It's a genuine worry", he says, and he raises yet another concern, given the heavy use of celebrity pictures in popular papers and magazines. "We don't want to see people stalking celebrities."
Scoopt's members, who numbered around 500 after three days, get advice on how to act legally and morally, although MacRae concedes that it will be a matter of personal responsibility.
What all this suggests is that despite the Internet providing people with a revolutionary way of becoming journalists, it does not answer the central dilemma of journalism itself: What is it for?
Democratization has burgeoned alongside the "free" market economy that encourages people to believe that everything, including information, has a price. Is that really so great an advance?
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