Dan Gillmor and the Sewer Ladies: The case for sustainable citizen journalism

I loved A Dying Craft, or a Dying Business? As part of his post, Dan Gillmor warns against letting media companies mooch off citizen journalists who are actually doing the work of traditional reporters.

Far from an enemy of the citizen journalism movement, Gillmor is one of its mainstays. But he writes: “I’ve heard through the grapevine about newspaper executives who think the answer may well be to encourage some form of citizen journalism–meaning, in their construct, getting people to do all the work pro journalists do today but for no compensation while the business collects the revenues. Now there’s a business model–not.”

So what are the solutions, especially for investigative stories? The case for citizen journalism is strong as a truth-spreader. In what follows, you’ll see how even the post-Watergate Washington Post could cover up a story about a powerful local businessman and Abraham Ribicoff, a senator dear to L Street. Still, citizen journalism must be sustainable, whether or not the local press is willing to pick up on a story.

One answer is obvious, fairness in pay for staffers and outsiders alike. Also helpful would be more foundation money for citizen journalists (I myself am involved with a group that has applied for a somewhat related grant).

Based on my own experiences, however, I also see a partial answer in the library world and the open government movement–blended with wise use of technology. What if libraries and local governments can get online enough material to dramatically reduce the leg work required of citizen journalists and professional reporters alike? Suppose there are more transcripts of meetings and more searchable databases, as well as multimedia C-SPANish coverage of local governments. Let’s also hear it for better access to and explanations of core documents such as budgets. No panaceas here. But such measures would help reduce the cost of good journalism of all varieties–in both money and time, two interrelated variables.

Smart tech vs. thousands in charges for records access

Wise use of technology is key. Investigative journalism is just a part of what I myself envision citizen journalists doing, but it is an important one, given the paucity of serious investigative efforts from the typical American daily. I myself can recall spending hundreds of hours investigating the federal office leasing program in the 1970s and at first being told by the ‘crats that the price tag would be many thousands for a computer run. None other than one of Ted Kennedy’s committee staffers had to intervene before I got part of what I needed. Mind you, this was with the Freedom of Information Act already in effect. Even with the computer run, I still had to examine the leases by hand. I’d hope that everything today was or could be automated, so that I could have spot-checked the leases rather than having to see every one.

Ease of access can indeed help keep government more honest–by casting light on the actionable facts. My scrutiny of federal leasing practices paved the way for investigations on Capitol Hill and by the General Accounting Office, along with a reform in leasing practices. I found that Ribicoff, the famous liberal Senator from Connecticut on a committee overseeing the General Services Administration, the federal housekeeping agency, had secretly owned a $20,000 share in a CIA-occupied building in Arlington, Virginia, from 1963-1968. GSA had leased the 12-story Key Building for spies.

So, yes, I know how investigative journalism can happen the old-fashioned way. I can appreciate how open government and well-audited databases could speed up the process, reducing the time commitment needed by citizen journalists and the traditional kind alike. Furthermore, with sources readily at hand for confirmation, editors could more easily vet the work of outsiders.

Meanwhile, in fairness to the press, including local media monopolies, let’s remember that many civic groups would almost pay to have their news in the local paper. I see no reason why papers should pay for the writing of the equivalent of press releases.

Of civics and sewer ladies

Also in the name of fairness to the media, I’d say it would help for neighborhood associations, PTAs and other civic groups to be as open as possible and blog their meetings in detail and even encourage members to do investigative work of the kind that the mainstream press often seems to avoid these days. That is a natural role for vigilant civic organizations watching out for their members’ health and property and general quality of life.

Should the media, then, refuse to pay the neighborhood associations or members for doing what citizens ideally would do anyway as part of their civic duties–investigating toxic polluters, for example, just as Erin Brockovich did for her law firm?

Well, that’s a tricky issue, the reason why I believe Dan is on target in warning against dumping pros in favor of amateurs. Remember, Brockovich was not simply an activist, with the related biases, good and bad. She was also on a payroll. My GSA investigation, by contrast, was built in part on the donated work of local “Sewer Ladies,” smart local housewives who knew their way around the local land records, not just the local sanitation authority. Louise Chesnut and Marian Agnew were two of the more prominent members of a band of similar housewives in the Washington suburbs. I wonder how many Sewer Lady equivalents exist today–some, undoubtedly, but not as many as before. In this age of careerism and two-earner households, typical SL prospects are not lovingly digging up sewage, so to speak. No, they are working for IBM or General Electric or law firms, and after hours, they may be chauffering their children around to tutors, in hopes of passing Super Achieverdom on to the next generation. Sewer Ladying is more strenuous than the usual blogging. You’ve actually got to step out of the house and visit the courthouse, especially if local records are invisible from cyberspace.

Free labor, then, just won’t get you as far these days as it might have. I myself could never have done my GSA investigation, the results of which were carried by Federal Times, a New Haven daily, and Pacific News Service and picked up by NBC, ABC, CBS and the New Republic, unless I had won a foundation grant.

And yet we need this kind of work. Were my findings newsworthy and useful? You bet. My investigation resulted in some reforms of federal office leasing practices. Ribicoff was involved in the lease through a partnership, not a corporation; and the local partnership records listed only the obscure name of a trust, not Ribicoff’s name. The excuse he gave wasn’t exactly compelling. He said he was a Key Building investor by accident–not the most likely possibility, considering that both the GSA and his federal contractor friends were supposed to scrutinize the lease. And the secrecy of the investment? Well, Ribicoff protested that he didn’t want to be called up if a tenant in the contractor’s building complained of a leaky toilet. Clearly Ribicoff’s ethics were questionable here despite his courageous work aiding Ralph Nader’s automobile safety crusade and despite his liberal politics with which I almost entirely agreed. Legally Ribicoff lucked out only because of a statute of limitations, having withdrawn from the Key Building after a political opponent highlighted the senator’s other associations with Smith. Would that blogs and the citizens journalism movement had existed as media-bypasses!

Citizen journalism as a media bypasser and augmenter: An issue even more important than pay

The resultant story about Ribcoff and Smith should have made at least an inside page of the Washington Post, given all the national publicity. appeared. Should. Washington Post real estate writer John Willmann even held a small investment in a bank controlled by my main target, Charles E. Smith, and his friends. The Post, perhaps because of a mix of the social ties with Ribicoff-Smith crowd, political sympathies and the Not Invented Here Syndrome, ignored the senator’s past violation of federal leasing laws although he was still overseeing the GSA. Small wonder that the The Brass Check, the Upton Sinclair classic about media cover-ups, means so much to me. Coincidentally or not, the media didn’t tell me about it. I learned of the book through Julian Holmes, a local civic activist who would be the first to join me in acknowledging the help that the Sewer Ladies provided.

L Street also ignored another GSA-related story in Federal Times, The Case of The Missing Cafeteria, in which a friend of Spiro Agnew got away with omitting a $500,000 cafeteria from the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency. I don’t think the Post people had social ties with the federal landlord involved, just a case of Not Invented Here, even after the General Accounting Office and congressional investigators confirmed my facts. The story was invisible to Post readers except through a mention in a Jack Anderson column. Bloggers might have left the Post with no choice but to follow up on this one.

Simply put, I’m an unabashed fan of citizen journalism because I know that the mainstream media so often won’t tell the whole story. Wittingly or unwittingly, they have downplayed the sleaziness behind copyright laws like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Issue Number One of citizen journalism isn’t a detail like pay, but what the mainstream press will and will not publish.

That includes not just negative stories but also positive ones. Time-consuming investigative work is just part of what citizens journalists should be about. We’re also talking about routine little news items that they can quickly dash off–news of local achievers, for example; that’s no small issue in minority neighborhoods. Even decades after the death of Jim Crow, white-owned newspapers focus too often on crime stories in urban ghettos, or on condescending exercises in pseudo-sociology. Citizen journalism could help fill in the news gap. Besides, must all news be political or criminal or related? How about citizens–of all colors–as dog-lovers or outdoors people or amateur radio operators or antique car enthusiasts, or podcasters? Why is it that David Faucheux is one of the most famous bloggers in the world of Audio Blogger (with links to his blog from both AB’s home page and FAQ) but the Lafayette Advertiser won’t write him up–his own hometown newspaper? Time for citizen journalists in Lafayette to do it? The Advertiser is depriving the local disability community of some helpful inspiration.

What’s more, local media monopolies can even shortchange local business establishments, and here again, citizen journalism could be at least a partial remedy. Some newspapers are not giving enough space to spotlighting economic successes that other cities and counties may have enjoyed. How could City A’s lessons in attracting out-of-town tech companies–and educating furture local techies–apply to City B? That’s just one example. Bloggers from local Chambers of Commerce could help fill the gap if they went about this in a civic-minded way, looking out for cities as a whole rather than just specific business interests. If the press then reproduced or linked to the blog entries, then so much the better.

But please–no ammunition for the newsroom Scrooges

Despite all this enthusiasm for citizen journalism, however, I can still appreciate Dan Gillmor’s concerns about the substitution of volunteers for paid full-time journalists at mainstream publications smart enough to see potential in CJ. We’re not talking about “either or” but rather about some commonsense here. The Scrooges already wield enough influence in the media world, and we mustn’t let them use citizen journalism as an excuse for further cutbacks in newsroom budgets.