Volunteer Journalism

Before I hop into this post, I’d like to share a personal anecdote that touches on this week’s readings in a humorous way.

A few years ago, my family had a garage sale. At the garage sale, we had a box marked ‘Free,’ of items we deemed too worthless for anyone to spend money on. No one took anything from the ‘Free’ box because they realized the items in there must be completely useless. So my mother changed the sign. Now, it was a ‘Buy one, get one free’ box. If you bought another item from the garage sale, you could take an item from that box. Immediately, there was a lot more interest in those items.

I understand that this is the “stuff” economy, where people are more willing to pay for things. But I do think it’s interesting that Chris Anderson writes that the difference between free and extremely cheap is huge, that people are far more willing to take something that is free than buy something that is cheap. In my personal anecdote, I experienced the complete opposite — people only willing to take something when they thought they were paying a little for it.

In this week’s readings, Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell duke it out over the future of digital media. In particular, they argue over the question of this race to free in the digital age, will journalists be paid?

Chris Anderson’s understanding of how the journalism industry could function without paying writers is defunct, in my opinion. In the example he uses to defend his position, he says that there were plenty of people willing to write for his parenting blog for free. That’s awesome for him, but this glosses past what the crux of journalism is. How could a serious story like the Panama Papers been broken by a bunch of part-time volunteer bloggers? Are there a lot of volunteers willing to sit through city council meetings and town halls and do write-ups?

When no one is paying for content, the public will get a poor version of the content, created by volunteers who are too busy with careers that actually support their life to put too much effort into journalism. No one would argue that the average video put on YouTube for free can compete with a film that people pay to see. There are already plenty of volunteer journalists, and while their work is great for sharing their opinion on slice-of-life issues, like parenting or recipes, or even their opinion on a variety of social issues, they rarely enhance the world with heavy-duty investigative or political journalism. At the end of the day, if the purpose of journalism is to inform the masses for a properly functioning democracy, what will a society that is by-and-large dominated by volunteer journalism look like?

But how often do these bloggers conduct interviews and research? How often do these bloggers reach out to industry and governmental leaders who make policy decisions, or to those people who are affected by policy decisions? The answer is hardly ever. But this is where the real work of journalism is.

I’m not saying I completely disagree with Anderson. For people who don’t work in media, he certainly paints a beautiful picture of a world where individuals don’t have to pay for media, and some of what he argued for is already coming true. But I am very skeptical that a democratic society fueled by volunteer journalism could be a well-functioning one.