the have nots

A few months ago, I was invited to speak as a panelist at the 2009 Schuneman Symposium, hosted by Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. The symposium’s topic was–surprise, surprise–politics and new media. I was invited to talk about my research and use of new media, as it pertained to my work with Scoop08 (now Scoop44) and coverage leading up to and during the election.

I thought that serving on a panel with academia, professionals and journalists would allow me to go unnoticed during the question and answer portion of the panel. Wrong; the first question for the panel I served on was explicitly directed to me: “Miss Huelsman, in your presentation, you referred to the ‘Facebook generation.’ Who is the ‘Facebook generation?’And aren’t you being an elitist by excluding those who don’t have access to the Internet?”

After overcoming the initial shock that a small-town-farm-girl-from-the-middle-of-nowhere was now being called an “elitist,” I paused for a moment and then rattled off the definition of the “Facebook generation,” as I had read in a recent news article. I explained that it is not an entire “generation,” per se, but rather a subset of “generation y” and “millenials” that exists because of its dependency on the Internet.

Then I considered the second part of the question–what about those who don’t have Internet access? As the journalism industry is in the transition of setting up residency online, what do we do to reach those have nots and make sure they can reach us?

We support citizen journalism. By giving citizen journalism our full support, the have nots are being more innovative than ever, employing methods of ground-breaking journalism. Here are two of my favorite examples:

• Last July, the Knight Foundation provided money for a project in Grahamstown, South Africa, in which cell phones were given to 80 senior scholars to report. The project, “Iindaba Ziyafika” (the news is coming), allowed users to use SMS, sending content via messaging, and, eventually, messages with audio and video. This method of citizen journalism is being brought to us by a country that completely skipped land-lines.
• The recent controversy in Iran and the inability for journalists to be in the vicinity of most of the events, has proved our reliance on real time news from citizens at the protests and rallies. Rather than reading second story accounts in the day’s newspaper or visiting CNN’s Web site, we receive first person accounts via SMS updates on Twitter.

The good news is that the “digital divide” that has been created by online journalism is closing. The better news is that by supporting and being open to citizen journalism, we become better journalists, too.

j