At the Denver Press Club, three professionally employed journalists and Jacob Richards of The Revolutionist, with the moderator, ostensibly discussed Citizen Journalism.

The impetus was clear from the original invitations made, that DoBetterDNVR was causing a specific discussion about Citizen Journalism, one style of it, specifically branded and anonymous.

Having just sat down with the guests upstairs, fresh off of socializing before, I knew I could handle the local tea for a while, if it was a gateway to discussion of more.

After all, I like places that have an air of industriousness brought in with the guests.

The panel itself, though, did not look much at Citizen Journalism, only why Professionals are in charge while God is gone. In fact, I may have already said the topic words together more times than they ever did the whole night.

I won’t begrudge the panel’s origin story, to do damage control on anonymous citizens violating norms enough to need coordinated correction. Critiquing what I heard at the panel seems unhelpful, as it was all so askew of Citizen Journalism.

They were defending themselves instead. That was all I needed to know.

Ethics

The panel took pains to locate the floor on “journalism” and mostly agreed that a person just holding up a phone sometimes isn’t something you should be proud of. I didn’t especially think this alone was the threat journalism faced, but I recognized some truth in what was said about such things being more easily treated as data needing curation. The citizens aren’t the journalists, they’re just crowdsourcing the news’ job from the goodness of their hearts!

There was some fuss about the metaphysical credential that professional journalists think they possess via the robes of the academy, as if the education that led to this shoddy state of things was supposedly still coveted.

They had us take their word for it that they were good historians and keepers of history and that this meant they had the power of context.

The context is empty, Professionals. You are just summarizing everyone else. Do you not read your own work? You write and write, but somehow you can’t link. You can’t link to court documents you’re discussing and directly quoting from. Are you stupid? Is that what seriousness on your part looks like?

Your Professional publications link topic words instead of articles. Your thirst for ad revenue is off the charts. Why did you link your business finances to how often other people act out? Why do you write content that is useless within hours? Who are you serving?

How is it that we’re still not talking about Citizen Journalists? Why is this panel a scramble for self-defense and rationalization? Are you pitching us that you still have worth? Is that the subject as they understand it?

The only man who conceded a failure of ethics in journalism–I applauded him for one part that had uncommon value–was the same man I walked out on for looking at us and saying with authority that There Is No Genocide In Gaza, that our eyes and ears were collective liars, and not him.

Content

The recurring insistence that the system itself had to be taken down, and then fixed, by the Professionals, was at first interesting to hear. It was not a fix that I expected to hear touted, but I was ready to listen.

The fact that this speaker used that position to propagandize us about The Real Truth made me nearly laugh. Instead my reaction was to leave. I didn’t miss much. I hear the panel crash landed soon after.

That this Professional could say earlier that journalism had to be torn down for his reason, had now astonished me. What truer sign could I need that this panel was not about Citizen Journalism? They were coopting the words because they were threatened that they meant something. They were explaining their weaknesses in front of us.

I listen raptly, because this covering of weakness is telling.

We didn’t get to ask enough questions, but the content in the room was useful to me.

These Professionals didn’t say a word about their content, because they don’t even care. They have no idea if their content is good, and they are endlessly fretting while publishing (conducting public polling) for an eyeball tally.

At some point we need to sort the kinds of journalist roped into this whole weird argument, but at the Denver Press Club on a Tuesday, it meant news media. In that light, the Professionals thought their content was just obviously good, because it gets the eyeballs that sustained them to today.

I’ll concede early that success is worth something, but how crude to assume they are doing well. Have they not captured the gates? Are they not now explaining to a room of Citizen Journalists why others must use their gate or fail to be valuable?

Jacob Richards was something else from the rest. Jacob Richards says content is fundamental. Jacob Richards saw each piece of content as bespoke and worth what motivation was put into it. The Professionals didn’t make contact with the idea, knowing that they truly don’t care about any specific 600 words in 200,000 written that year.

The issue of journalistic reliability is not discussable without this insight into their mode of business:

When they say Reliability, they mean their entrenched Availability.

They are devious for co-mingling these. They mistake form for function, and they argue that the damage is such now that they should be in charge of handling what supposed difference is left.

In a business plan, one could never pre-plan the content quality itself; Quality is a dependent variable, not an independent variable. The plan must spring up around the presumption of content, and perform the rituals for its creation.

These journalism businesses are no different. They write because if they don’t, they lose their jobs. How’s that for incentives?

Motive

A citizen journalist has nothing but this motive of theirs. What is it? How do we meet the citizen’s intent, if it’s even given?

Irreverent citizens sometimes deploy You May Not Like This But. Volunteer social media managers for them might deploy You’ll Never Believe This. The Professionals scrawl You Need This Context Because We Are The Main Characters In Your Story.

Professionals, what are you even doing? It is not possible to write about issues without generality, but I think the liberal news machine is more dead than we can fully perceive yet. With that collapse underway, conservative media has not yet reached distant progressives, like incoming starlight.

Podcasting has become such a loud form of media while we are trapped with ourselves. It is a preacher to one, a pre-recorded talk with good grooves and a nice voice, the real qualities of Journalism.

Marketing, marketing, marketing. Sponsored by. Subscribe to. After this. Visit that. Try those. Our Content Isn’t Valuable But Your Pledged Attention Is.

A citizen doesn’t do journalism at the point of sponsorship. A citizen did it for a Pandora’s Box of reasons. A “Professional” wouldn’t bother unless they got paid.

We need Professionals for a lot, but not the gatekeeping.

I wonder what the Professionals would do if communities started talking to themselves directly instead of on publicly tapped mediums?

I wonder what the Professionals would do if they had to go somewhere for “journalism” without a social media login welcoming them back.

I wonder what the Professionals would do if production staff vanished but they still believed they had something worth saying.

I wonder what the Professionals would do if they had to work for anything again without the appeal to their own Authority.

I wonder what the Professionals will say when they start providing their context with LLMs, and still fret over how citizens can’t do what they do.

Are these the brokers of value, who are doomed to fail at their encyclopedian task anyway? Is the quality of our news supposed to scale with your hiring expansions? There’s so much content out there, can’t you convert it into income just by hiring? How many are you hiring? How many are you firing? How many departments are you selling to a billionaire so that you can just forget about your failed model and keep bringing bread home?

In citizen journalism, the content is all there is. In news media, individual fistfuls of content are unremarkable from any other, part of a mass noun.

If content must speak and not the name or brand identity, it must stand on its own.

I like this more original appraisal of value, before we talk about sponsors or who is the most qualified historian to comment next.

I forgive the Professional panelists at Denver Press Club for using a definition of journalism that is predominantly the one they experience every day, but their lack of familiarity with any alternative was somewhat a concern.

Bias

We got to hear somewhat about how bias must be accepted as real (thanks chief) but also how the Guardians Of The Context were watching. One of these panelists hadn’t yet made an open call for a planet’s worth of context to be shredded for the comfort of his genocide denial, but at the moment he placated us that bias was just something that happens.

We weren’t going to solve Bias there in that room in those chairs, but some hid or obfuscated theirs, while Jacob spoke like bias might be just another word for perspective, and we have frameworks for respecting those already.

Bias, like framing, provides expectations and rules for what’s coming, which doesn’t sound so offensive. If bias or framing works invisibly, we start to have problems.

Bias is an ingredient, and may even be crucial. It may not be the individual’s bias that matter’s, but the publication’s. The Little Mermaid puts its first rationalization for mermaids in the title, not chapter 1 or throughout. With that information, the rest of the story is free of confused side questions.

I sensed from the panel an unhealthy relationship with bias.

They fear themselves. Perhaps they are still not post-Woke, maybe not truly post-Politically Correct. Has it has paralyzed them for so long that they’ve forgotten how to speak without already Knowing they have the right of it?

Questions

As I listened to them discuss stewardship of our work as their data constellation, so undemocratically decided without a mic near us spectators, it seemed clear these people would not comprehend the questions I had brought for them.

I struggled for what to ask them with the waning time. I wanted to ask about reliability, about this acceptance of incentives as necessary to some apparatus I also didn’t accept.

Importantly, I wanted to discuss with them their relationship to core journalism. Instead, they assuaged us that the money they take is just a detail, briefly insisted that Journalism Must Serve Israel More, or that AI witnessing their own content is a crime more important than what the Citizen Journalists are trying to say nearby.

It sure sounds like you have a lot of drama, Professionals. Are you saying this is all for our own protection?

I wish I could have come up with the most dismissive thing to say about all of what they said and push multiple questions at them.

In the end, my question about Reliability wasn’t taken, but I discussed it with some after the event broke.

Q&A format is difficult with multiple panelists unless a moderator can force a question to a great single panelist. The matter of stellar moderation is too important. Future events made with my involvement will use novel feedback methods and open-ended silent polling.

It amazed me a little that at a panel about Citizen Journalism, we didn’t talk about methods of getting good information, working to validate damaged information, thinking widely enough to detect angles outside our biases.

These Professionals wouldn’t have anything to say on these things, I decided. They would be prone to giving answers like Attend Our Workshop.

The Professionals did not learn this in school, they acquired this behavior after. I suspect this is the expiring academism on display, angsty that it has to explain its tautological worth, not having practiced.

I had questions they don’t put on FAQs, because I’m not a pull-string muppet.

What drives Value at your publication?

• In a world that competes with you simultaneously every time you publish about anything, what do you wake up and work on to produce Value?
• How do you measure or hypothesize about Value in that marketplace?
• Do you do more than deploy conventional surveys on your readers designed by consultants?
• Tell me about a time you feel you adjusted core methodology to align with what you believed your job is as a journalist.
• When you look around at your staff, what’s the one thing you want to know they all share with you?
• Has one of your values been tested in a way you didn’t expect?
• What’s your biggest cautionary lesson on keeping good documentation?
• What’s a habit you wish you formed sooner?

What is the hardest part of addressing the criticisms of your accountability?

• If your boss became unaccountable, what would be the sign of it in your publication?
• Can you tell me about past improvements you’ve made?
• What kind of feedback is especially top of mind for you?
• Tell me about a customer you lost but tried to keep.
• Have you ever considered recurring transparency reports about the edits your writers make to your industrial-scale publication?
• What’s the one time you recall being nervous about putting your name on something?
• How do you know when to challenge your peers?
• Is there someone at your job who can tell you don’t have one anymore if you publish something?
• Do you believe your “reliability” is a suitable proxy for trust in all scenarios?
• How do you detect topics that are deeper than you know?
• What is the value of contextual completionism in practice, at the scale of the modern web?
• Does your workplace feel sloppier insider than its Brand projects?
• When was the last time you implemented a correction on your own work that was older than a week?
• What is the oldest an article was when you went back to it to edit it?
• Do some types of edits generate notifications?
• Is there a durable log of more than the last edit date?
• How do you recommend readers tell that other articles may be cemented together poorly?
• What are the devious tricks you see others use that you caution against?

When was the last time you collected useful feedback?

• Does your site leverage comment systems, first- or third-party?
• Have you found value in feedback channels that your workplace doesn’t use enough?
• Which channels, if any, at your publication do the journalists receive feedback?
• When is the last time you wrote about a city you’ve never been to?
• When was the last time you conducted an interview?
• Do you ever ask for feedback after your discussions or interviews?
• What proportion of your public email from readers do you reply to?
• What is the biggest hurdle to finding useful feedback in what readers say?
• Describe your familiarity with any encryption tools.
• Tell me about the last time you facilitated feedback that needed to be heard, and wouldn’t have been without your involvement.
• What question do you have but can’t ask the right people?
• What role does hypothesis play when small voices publish?

With AI everywhere around us, what makes quality writing?

• How do you know something was worth the read by the end?
• What is your favorite kind of journalistic question?
• Do you get excited to see styles or methods that have fallen out of favor?
• When chasing popular subjects feels wrong, how do you remind yourself of your most meaningful goals and make progress there?
• What would you view your role as if AI assistants were reading all my news for me?
• Do you think LLMs can help you unit test your publication’s sourced writing for accuracy, on a paragraph by paragraph basis?

You can reach Autumn Ryan to be heard about this subject at [email protected]. Do not transmit sensitive or private information if it’s unsuitable for others to have.