News at 11 - viewers as reporters

Tonight at 11, news by neighbors
Santa Rosa TV station fires news staff, to ask local folks to provide programming
Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, February 11, 2007

Steve Spendlove realizes that after last month's layoffs of most of the news-gathering staff at tiny KFTY-TV in Santa Rosa there will be less local coverage. The Clear Channel executive overseeing the station knows there won't be reporters to investigate local scandals, let alone do those fluffy woman-turns-100 features that make TV anchors cock their heads and smile at the end of a newscast.
But Spendlove said that the station's "business model" hadn't been working for years, and that "covering one-eighth of the Bay Area" is neither a moneymaker nor even an operation large enough to be measured by Nielsen ratings.
So the next step in Channel 50's evolution will be a nationally watched experiment in local television coverage. Over the next few months, the station's management plans to ask people in the community -- its independent filmmakers, its college students and professors, its civic leaders and others -- to provide programming for the station.
Will they be paid? That's being worked out. Who will cover the harder-edged stories? Some will be culled from local newspaper and TV online sites, Spendlove said, and "other sources" that are still being discussed.
"There will be a loss in local coverage, I'm not going to lie to you," he said. "But there are a lot of other places to get most of that information."
Spendlove is loath to dub what's coming next to Channel 50 as "citizen journalism," the industry buzz term that is journalism's equivalent of user-generated content online. Broadly defined, citizen journalism means tapping into the wisdom and creativity of the audience and enabling nonprofessionals to become part of the news-gathering process. Media analysts believe there may be 700 citizen journalism outfits reporting on geographic nooks of the country and countless other bloggers doing various versions of the local news.
Many of them are self-funded "fusions of news and schmooze" sites "that don't produce finished stories like you'd see at traditional journalism outlets," said Jan Schaffer, who heads J-Lab, a citizen journalism think tank at the University of Maryland.
In a J-Lab survey released this month, many citizen journalists felt they were "a success" not because they had tons of readers, but because they had called attention to local problems overlooked by larger media outlets.
Some citizen video journalists, particularly outside the United States, have had a larger impact.
When last year's coup in Thailand shut down traditional local media outlets, images downloaded from citizen journalists to CNN's "I-Report'' were the cable giant's only window into the action. And much has been told about how the first images of the July 2005 London terrorist bombings were recorded by cell phone cameras. The genre's runaway success story is OhmyNews in South Korea, which not only has tens of thousands of citizen contributors but is profitable.
"Traditional journalists, even the very best ones, can only tell a story from the outside looking in," said Mitch Gelman, CNN.com's executive producer. "What you get from citizen journalists is a view from the inside looking out. It is a complement to our coverage."
Trust is an issue
As the media landscape shifts, traditional television executives are figuring out how comfortable they are in letting the audience express themselves. The potential army of cheap news gatherers poses a dilemma: While editors love the idea of receiving images from a coup in Thailand hours before their news crew arrives at the scene, many editors don't totally trust the public, especially when it comes to reporting hard news stories.
"People come to CBS News because it's a trusted source of information that they know has been vetted," said Mike Sims, director of news and operations at CBS.com. "That's why we've been slower to move into citizen journalism."
Still, Sims said CBS will in the next few months unveil more ways to involve viewers. TV news operations and their online partners can't ignore the YouTube-driven interest in user-generated content -- or how those efforts can help build a loyal audience.
So with names like "I-Report" (CNN), "You Witness News" (Yahoo-Reuters partnership) and "Moving Pictures" (a feature begun this month at Bay Area NBC affiliate KNTV), TV news is slowly exploring ways to involve the audience in its productions.
"Everybody is trying to catch lightning in a bottle trying to figure out a way to interact with citizens," said Spendlove, a senior vice president for the Western region of Clear Channel Television who works in Fresno. "We're hoping to find a new way to compete in an area where the big boys couldn't afford to do it."
"I have my own silly little term," Spendlove said. "Local content harvesting."
If that sounds a bit too agricultural for Fourth Estate purists, you should hear Spendlove talk about "renewable content" programming -- a steady stream of offerings from a single source. Although he expects some cost savings from Channel 50's changeover, he anticipated that the station may have to employ more editors to thresh all the harvested content.
Memoirs of a journalist
That's the one universal among citizen journalism efforts: Nobody quite knows what type of user-generated content will work best on a traditional news site -- except that it won't be the Mentos-in-a-Diet Coke bottle fodder that made YouTube worth $1.6 billion to Google. That's too random for a news site.
Yet personal essays are what viewers submit most often. Viewers flooded CNN's "I-Report'' with remembrances and images after Steve "The Crocodile Hunter" Irwin died.
"This is the beginning of something, so I'd be very suspicious of anyone who said they had figured it out yet," said MSNBC.com Deputy Editor Tom Brew, who will begin training next week on a rebranded citizen journalism site.
The technology is there -- anybody with a camera-equipped cell phone who happens to be in the right place at the right time can become a citizen video journalist. But not everyone is poised for action. For example, there's no shortage of weather photos -- snow shots are especially popular -- but Brew said, "I don't think we're to the point where somebody in Florida just survives a storm and says, 'I'm going to upload some video to MSNBC.com.' "
That will change as viewers in their teens and 20s come of age, said Scott Moore, head of news and information for Yahoo Media Group, which has been beta-testing a citizen-journalism effort with Reuters for two months. "This next generation is much quicker about flipping open their cell phone if they see a bus crash happen in front of them and uploading the video," Moore said.
A passer-by shot still cell phone images of a fiery car crash in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood in April and sent it to CBS 5-TV. And the Bay Area's KTVU broadcast citizen cell phone video shot last month of a plane crash in Concord and of an armored car fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains. But those submissions have been rare, station officials said.
"If there's breaking news, we want to hear from people," said CBS 5-TV News Director Dan Rosenheim. "But beyond that, we want to rely on our own people. It's a quality control issue."
A hybrid model
At KNTV, editors are trying a hybrid model as a way to test user-generated coverage. Last month, they gave digital still cameras to a dozen viewers, including an injured Iraqi war veteran and a gravedigger. Editors and reporters at the station reviewed the photos, then returned to interview the subjects and tell a "Moving Pictures" story based on the still images.
At first blush, some photos seemed odd -- like the picture of a footbridge sent by a Richmond teen.
"But when we went back to interview her, she said, 'This is the only place I can feel safe from the violence around here,' " said KNTV Assistant News Director Mark Neerman, who conceived of the "Moving Pictures" idea. "Now that's something that we probably wouldn't get in a traditional news story."
What's next for citizen-shot video? CNN's Gelman sees citizen journalists attending a house party in Iowa with a presidential candidate. Yahoo's Moore sees more high school sports coverage.
But what about bias? What if the citizen correspondent conveniently overlooks that the quarterback -- who happens to be her son -- threw five interceptions that cost his team the game?
Moore foresees such stories evolving wiki-style -- referring to the technology used by the publicly created encyclopedia Wikipedia.com -- edited by a community of writers who would pounce on such gross bias.
That said, Moore said, "I don't expect to see ordinary citizens reporting from the White House briefing room in my lifetime."
Two views
"Traditional journalists, even the very best ones, can only tell a story from the outside looking in. What you get from citizen journalists is a view from the inside looking out. It is a complement to our coverage."
-- Mitch Gelman, CNN.com executive producer
"If there's breaking news, we want to hear from people. But beyond that, we want to rely on our own people. It's a quality control issue."
-- Dan Rosenheim, CBS 5-TV news director
E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle