~a column by Colleen O’Brien
In April of 2015, I wrote about a way to get the news other than via newspapers, broadcast, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media.
An audacious new way of on-the-spot news reporting was named NewsByMe, unofficially known as “citizen journalists.” This little application on one’s phone made it possible for anyone to play reporter.
It encouraged anyone with a smart phone to report events around them in no time — immediate photos and names and locations of happenings, dramatic incidents – George Floyd in May of 2020, pinned down for nine minutes and 29 seconds by an officer’s foot on his neck till he could no longer breathe; our new kind of warriors capturing and giving us on-the-spot news from several viewpoints at once of street crimes this past winter by Minneapolis-deployed ICE shooting and killing innocent passerby Renee Nicole Good and legal protestor Alex Pretti. All it takes is to hit the streets and start filming bad cops and the administration’s thugs. They seem to be everywhere, so lots of smart phones clicking is a good thing.
I also appreciate the citizen journalist who snapped the photo of the president flipping off an autoworker for calling him a “pedophile protector.”
Many events never get aired in traditional media because of lack of reporters as well as time or space limitations within the rigidness of news outlets.
Pason Gaddis, the longtime newsman who designed the NewsByMe app, earned his BA at Iowa State and worked for the Iowa State Daily, then for Gannett Media. His belief was that “The two most formidable weapons in the rapidly shifting history of news reporting and event awareness — a smart phone and an alert human being.”
His idea of reporting was news not just for the people but by the people.
We’ve always had freedom of speech, and because of him we literally have freedom of the press.
I can no longer find NewsByMe in the App Store, but all it takes to be a citizen journalist is to be aware and snap the scene and send it to a TV station, then to friends and especially to representatives in Congress.
And here we are: the citizen journalist has not bypassed the legacy press but is aiding and abetting these once formidable giants who need help. They also need to be held to account by holding to account the government and American capitalism.
Once traditional reporters receive a photo lede from a citizen journalist, they can assume their pose: investigating the story that will fill in the blanks surrounding the photos pouring in from regular people. Because of several videographers sending their various perspectives to others as well as to local TV stations, the public is getting more news faster and widely verified by different perspectives
My point of view from a history of working for the press is that these citizen journalists are a form of benign vigilantes – folks who are vigilant, who pay attention and do something about it. They help the entrenched media who can afford only so many reporters on the ground.
All of us have opportunities to report, whether it be of our kid’s music recital or the ICEman killing. This form of universal support at the ready has changed us and our society, I think for the better. These picture-taking folks from one end of the country to the other inform us from each of their vantage points of incidents that catch illegal governmental actions.
We need these citizen journalists who support one another and us.
I would like it if the traditional reporters would do the same for one another as well as us: the president yells at a female Bloomberg News reporter on Air Force One, “Quiet, piggy,” because she asked him about the Epstein files; why did her reporter compadres sitting around her not stick up for her?
This would have been a good start, however late in the game, for reporters to help their readers by helping one another. Trump has been rude and cruel to individual reporters for years without recourse: the press has not backed up their cohorts with the same question.
I’m tired of – I’m exhausted from – Trump’s lies and my learning, long after the fact, of hundreds of lies I never read about at the time. The lack of courage by the press in letting him get away with lies and crude behavior when reporters could have been making a report of it all along is killing my stamina.
I’m waiting for the reporters — one at a time — to turn away, walk away to the back of the plane or out of the Oval Office — leave the awful autocrat without his main reason for living — an audience.
It seems now that there’s too much news coming at us, but it beats too little. The world sees a constant stab at the truth because of our citizen journalists.
