Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
It's kind of intimidating following your boss.
(Laughter)
So I'm excited to be here.
This is a historical event at our college,
and so I'm just excited to be able to share my thoughts
on citizen journalism, social media and ethics.
So let's begin.
So the '60s and the '70s were a time
in which we saw a lot of challenges and a lot of struggles.
We saw the fight for civil rights and equality.
And we saw a transformation from segregation to desegregation.
And the revolution was televised.
It was televised,
and what we saw on TV was the truth.
It was valued, and the people who were delivering that truth
were news anchors
who were pillars of our communities.
So fast-forward to the '90s.
Because if you look at the picture, the '80s weren't really good for me -
I had a Jheri curl, was kind of awkward.
But the '90s
is when I had my mind and my heart set on a career in journalism.
I attended James Madison University.
I had gone there for yearbook camps
for two summers,
and I was going to be the next Barbara Walters.
I used to tell people that all the time.
Young people, google her.
I used to tell people I was going to be the next Barbara Walters.
Well, the Barbara Walters and the Dan Rathers
and the Maureen Bunyans of the world
had been replaced by muckraker.com, @AnnaHolmes
and by everyday people,
citizen journalists who take to social media
to provide commentary
about everything from politics to education to parenting to foods
to the bundle of hair that I'm buying -
everything that you could imagine.
And some of our fellow citizen journalists do so without fact-checking,
without a moral compass
and without fair and balanced reporting.
And so I'm not here to, you know, put a label on citizen journalism
or put a label on social media,
because there's utility in both,
but what I'm here to do is to kind of shed some light
on the need and the fact that there has to be a thread of ethics
because so many people place value on social media
and the content that we crave or that we get from social media.
And so citizen journalism -
that term came about
as a result of the democratization of the digital media area.
And so what we see is more access,
to being able to share and communicate with folks,
the freedom to do it
over a medium that is designed for entertainment purposes.
But when you think about citizen journalism,
you have to think, like,
is it something that's just new or has it been around?
And for me,
probably one of the most significant, or prominent, instances
of citizen journalism
was the videotaped beating of Rodney King.
So one person's video
sent to mainstream media
not only changed California, but it changed the world forever.
So what does social media do to that landscape?
Well, social media gives everyday people the opportunity to hide behind a veil
to produce content
that has both local and national and global significance.
But there's no credibility
or there's no sanctions attached to what they're doing,
whether it's factual, right, wrong, good or bad.
And so I think that when you look at the landscape,
it's important for us to ask some questions.
Journalists have a code of ethics that they have to follow.
And this code of ethics
is not anything that you sign off on contractually as a journalist;
it's something that you abide by.
And for everyday people that are producing news
or that use social media landscape to produce news,
like I said, there aren't any sanctions.
But think about some things.
I want to share some stories.
So, Jayson Blair was a rising star in the world of journalism,
and in 2003, he was working for The New York Times,
and they launched an investigation
and found that out of 76 articles,
33 of those articles contained instances of plagiarism, fabrication
or pure unethical behavior.
And what about Brian Williams,
who had to retract a story in which he shared
that he was in a helicopter that was hit by enemy groundfire
while he was covering the news in Iraq.
And it hasn't been a year since NBC severed ties with Billy Bush
as a result of some inappropriate audio that was leaked to the media.
So I share these examples to drive home the point:
these three journalists - their careers were impacted,
and probably one of the things that they lost was their credibility,
their news value as journalists.
But everyday citizens like you and me,
we take to this entertainment medium,
and we can talk about anything that we want to.
We can create threads of angry chatter.
We can create a space for positive and healthy discourse -
depending on what our intentions are.
And so I think:
for citizen journalists out there that really want to do this
and that really want to have an impact,
I have three points that I want you to consider.
The first is to have good intentions.
So what is your purpose behind posting,
behind engaging on social media to begin with?
Is it to be controversial?
And if so, do your controversial actions have an intended outcome
that's going to impact the greater good in a positive way?
Is your goal to become the next social media star?
I don't have a problem with that.
If I could be a million-dollar social media star right now,
my TED Talk would be teaching you all how to do it too.
But when you take to social media
and you're using words that are so powerful,
what impact does that have on the traditional field of journalism?
It has a significant impact.
So, again, what are your intentions?
So one of the movements
that I think was directly connected to social activism and citizen journalism
was that of the Black Lives Matter movement.
I think that it started with good intentions,
and it still has good intentions
although it was impacted by outliers
such as hatred, misunderstanding and a loss of momentum at one point.
What this has done,
it's moved from being a hashtag
to being a space
in which citizen journalists are now sharing the stories
in which law enforcement
are coming together with communities across the country
to fix what has been a longstanding, fractured relationship.
And I don't think that we would have as much attention on the positives
if it weren't for citizen journalists -
everyday people like you and I who are recounting these stories,
who are sharing these stories - their personal stories.
So, again, what are your intentions?
The second one is to be responsible for your content.
How many of you went on social media this morning and posted something?
Raise your hands - I really can't see you.
A lot of us.
So - and sometimes you just - it's based on how you feel.
You just type, and you hit send or whatever the button you hit.
You hit the button, and boom, it's gone.
And then, if you're like me, you go back and check every few minutes
to see how many likes you got, if you got any shares.
But you're really not doing anything to harm anyone
because your content is not designed that way.
It's not designed to do harm;
it's designed just to share, to be your self-expression.
But because there's so much fake news and because of the rise in fake news
as people view it through the lens of social media practitioners,
some folks believe that social media needs to have a legal context to it
so that we can help to flush out the fake news.
Now fake news didn't just happen as a result of the social media wave;
it's been around for a long time.
But I think when you have something like a social media tool,
where news can travel faster, seemingly, than the speed of light,
you have to be concerned
about the power of those words that are being shared.
And so you have to ask yourself,
Am I putting out junk or chatter, or am I putting out real news?
And how does what I create as a citizen journalist impact the field?
Which leads me to my last point:
value the profession.
At heart, I'm a journalist,
and it's really important for me to engage in storytelling,
and one of the things that I think about social media and citizen journalism
is that it allows the real story to be told.
Everyday people who are living and breathing in a situation
are telling their story.
They're telling their story unedited.
They don't have to worry about a word count for a print medium.
They don't have to worry about a time frame for a news story.
And here's the best part:
they're doing it in an environment that is not profit-driven -
or at least not yet.
So let's hope we can keep it that way.
So it's really important to have this intersection of understanding
between traditional, paid journalists and amateur journalists
who are passionate about some things that they talk about on a regular basis
and who have developed a really strong following of people
who share similar concerns.
And so I love social media.
I am one of those 40-something people
who took over Facebook from all the young kids out there,
and I'm proud to say,
"Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, for making it the mom-and-dad platform."
But you will rarely see my journalistic acumen
come to life on social media.
Because there's something that I value about traditional news delivery,
and I'm always amazed at my students who will, at the beginning of class -
because you can never get away from a cellphone in a class,
so if you can incorporate it in your class, you know,
the 90 minutes go by a lot quicker.
So I always, you know, ask kids,
"Tell me what's happening in the world. Tell me what's going on."
The first thing they do is go to social media.
They won't go to a C-SPAN.com
or a CNN.com,
or they won't pull up, you know, a New York Times paper -
they'll go to social media.
And then they'll go to another social media platform
to do their fact-checking.
(Laughter)
So the reality is, we're all looking for short cuts
in terms of consuming news and information.
It's important - we live in a fast-paced world.
We're always moving.
We really don't have time to do the hardcore research that we need to do.
That being said,
all the more reason for an ethical thread to be woven through this process.
Now, the Society for Professional Journalism
does have a series of points in terms of their ethical code of conduct.
And they include but they're not limited to
things like being responsible for the accuracy of your work,
making sure that you don't take shortcuts
or oversimply what you're putting out there,
staying away from stereotypes and making sure you stick to the facts,
and creating a space in which we can engage in discourse
and accept and value the opinion of others
even if we don't like the things that other people have to say.
And so I think ethical journalism matters.
It matters at all levels:
whether you are a paid, trained professional
or whether you're an unpaid, amateur journalist.
And so if you're a citizen journalist out there,
continue the work.
If you're a budding citizen journalist,
start your career with a foundation in ethics.
I think the revolution will continue to be televised -
maybe not in the same way.
But we know that for the next four years, it's going to be tweeted about.
You're going to see it on Snapchat.
You're going to see it on Instagram.
Thanks to my students, you'll see it on Facebook live.
But how will you be impacted
the next time you snap a picture, record a video, read, write or post?
Thank you.
(Applause)