By Andrew Conte
Andrew Conte, Ph.D., founded the Center for Media Innovation at Point Park University in Pittsburgh. His work focuses on community-engaged approaches to the challenges facing journalism, including the Citizen Reporting Academy, which plans to launch its second pilot cohort in January 2025. Conte wrote “Death of the Daily News,” which was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2022.
Leann Marie Gilmore does not technically live in a news desert, but it often feels like one to her.
Pennsylvania’s heavily forested Huntingdon County still has two newspapers, The Daily News and a weekly called The Valley Log. A family-owned company publishes both and coverage favors the county seat, more than a 50-minute drive from some residents in the southern part where Gilmore lives.
“We don’t always have reporters in our area,” Gilmore, 42, wrote in a personal statement about the value of local news, which she prepared for a citizen reporting class at Point Park University in Pittsburgh. “I hope to fill that void and give my community a real voice. I want to give true and accurate information about events that are going on around us.”
With a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Gilmore had worked as a mental health case manager until the pandemic. Citizen reporting, she figured, might serve as a gig-economy job while raising her three young children.
Gilmore joined a small group of people for an experiment in the fall of 2023. They formed the first cohort of a Citizen Reporting Academy at the university’s Center for Media Innovation, which I run. We want to teach amateurs the basics of journalism so they can provide more reliable, objective and relevant information to their neighbors.
Professional journalists have long faced ethical dilemmas about whether they should work with the amateur public, citing fears about how well ordinary people can discern reliable and worthwhile information.[1][2][3]
As technology has evolved and newsrooms have shrunk, however, citizens increasingly are taking up the work of creating content and serving as gatekeepers to information – even if they would not call it journalism. People share content to platforms such as Facebook and Instagram without considering that these postings create a shared narrative within their circles of contacts.
Having citizens involved in local news raises ethical questions, externally, about whether the public can be trusted to gather and disseminate information and, internally, about what it means to ask professionals to work with amateurs.
Answers are emerging through practice. Professionals have both a responsibility and a self-interest to engage with the “people formerly known as the audience”[4] and to help them do a better job of identifying and disseminating actual news. Rather than taking over the role of journalists, engaged citizens can expand coverage areas and provide more diverse perspectives.
Professional newsrooms no longer have the luxury of shunting aside interested and engaged citizen journalists when paid positions for professional journalists are disappearing.
Down 77% over the past two decades, newspapers had the steepest job losses among all industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, according to a 2024 analysis by The Washington Post.[5] In a paradox that underscores how much the definition of this work is shifting, the government counts more reporters at online publishers, newswires, and nonprofits, as well as among independent journalists, than at traditional news organizations.
Amid this drastic transformation, citizens are assuming greater control over local news even in places where traditional outlets remain. They are discovering information and deciding what pieces are worth sharing with the people in their networks, filling a role that could be called “citizen gatekeeping.” They do this “work” across many platforms that range from informal conversations to social media sites to collaborations with traditional media to their own independent news sites.
Even in places that do not register as “news deserts,” at least not as defined by Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative, many people look at the available sources of local news and do not see themselves represented. That makes sense even with a traditional understanding of newspapers, which are often owned and led by older, white, politically connected men.
When Chicago-based columnist Laura Washington coined the phrase “communications desert” in 2011, she was talking about the lack of coverage for poor, urban communities within that city, despite multiple newspapers, online news outlets, and radio and TV stations.[6] “From mainstream news organizations to Internet upstarts, too many in the media traffic in stale conventional wisdom, stereotypes and misinformation about the lives and aspirations of those who live on the margins,” Washington wrote for the publication In These Times.[7]
Maps like those deployed by Northwestern show the spread of news deserts but they fail to reveal the ground-level concerns of people who feel they have less access to local information because of the hollowing out of newsrooms.
Despite their ambitions to cover the entire community, traditional newsrooms never had the ability to report all the news from every perspective. Years of budget cuts and layoffs have made that challenge even more difficult, despite growing awareness about the need and desire for greater newsroom diversity.
Even more than in major metro newspapers, local newsrooms have tended to rely on staff drawn from the community, with editors and reporters who live among the people they cover. In that context, it makes sense that citizens again see themselves playing a seemingly natural role in discovering and disseminating information about the places where they live.
Today, people who feel underrepresented no longer must wait for someone to take notice. Among the positive changes of new technologies, citizens are using smartphones that record live audio and video to document moments such as the 2020 police murder of George Floyd.[8]
At the same time, my research in the city of McKeesport, 15 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, shows that reliable news gets mixed in confusing ways with inaccurate, biased and irrelevant information. After the city lost its 131-year-old newspaper in 2016, residents quickly grew frustrated and pessimistic about the places where they live because they could no longer easily discern reality amid inaccurate, biased and irrelevant messages from their neighbors.
The idea of engaging the public in journalism has roots that date back at least two decades. John Temple at the late Rocky Mountain News launched YourHub.com in 2005 with 39 online editions linked to local communities with contributions from the people who lived in them.[9] The website outlived the newspaper as an online feature of The Denver Post (that still redirects from YourHub.com) but it did not spark a revolution of citizen-created content.[10]
The Huffington Post similarly experimented with the idea of empowering the lay public by publishing “citizen journalism publishing standards” in 2009 and then opening its platform to anyone who wanted to share “news.”[11] The standards read like the outline of a journalism 101 course with guidance such as “stick to the facts” and “avoid hearsay.”
More than 100,000 people took up Huffington on its offer, including ordinary citizens as well as President Obama and Oprah. What seemed like a success quickly turned to an indecipherable mess. Less than a decade later, the website turned off the service saying that overlapping voices drown out the truth: “When everyone has a megaphone, no one can be heard.”[12]
Programs that bring interested citizens in closer contact with journalism practitioners and educators also are emerging.
Chicago’s City Bureau, a civic nonprofit newsroom that started in 2015, created a Documenters program to equip and empower amateurs with tools to cover public meetings under the goal of making “local government accountable and transparent.”[13] The Documenters Network now has active participation in 17 American cities with an approach that not only expands coverage areas but does so in inclusive and equitable ways. Its documenters take notes at public meetings and share that information publicly, but they typically do not create news articles.
The Citizen Reporting Academy we started at Pittsburgh’s Point Park University in 2023 seeks to educate citizens on the basics of journalism. It recognizes that many people want to tell the stories of where they live, and they desire both the tools and the credentials to do the work.
The initial cohort covered the basics of local journalism across nine two-week courses focusing on topics such as interviewing skills, how to read a municipal meeting agenda, how to develop a brand and, even, how to make money.
The courses were both online and asynchronous, open to students from urban, suburban and rural areas with internet access. The group included two high school students as well as several people in their 60s. One student participated from Portland, Oregon. Three people paid their own way and nine were sponsored by a local publisher, Trib Total Media.
Students who completed the courses are, so far, using their skills to tell more feature stories than accountability investigations.
Jill Thurston has taken a part-time reporting job at the Observer-Reporter in Washington, Pennsylvania, where she has written about a Catholic nun who published her 50th novel and two young people who recreated a frontier fort in their hometown. Vickie Babyack in McKeesport, Pennyslvania, has written about housing for men recovering from addiction and about an emu that got loose. This content will not keep public officials from abusing tax dollars, but it helps restore some of the social capital among neighbors that gets lost when stories remain untold.
Gilmore, too, has filed only a couple light features for the newspapers in her county, but like the others, she now has the ability and insights to contribute to her community’s shared conversation in productive ways. And she aspires to do more.
“My commitment to my community is to be open and available to anyone that has an important message to share,” Gilmore wrote in her statement of beliefs for the class assignment. “I promise to verify their information and fact check before passing along any information. I feel everyone should have a voice and access to fair and balanced news. I hope to be that voice for my community.”
[1] Henrik Örnebring, “Anything You Can Co, I Can Do Better? Professional Journalists on Citizen Journalism in Six European Countries,” International Communication Gazette, February 2013. doi:10.1177/1748048512461761
[2] Axel Bruns, “News Produsage in a Pro-Am Mediasphere: Why Citizen Journalism Matters,” in News Online: Transformations and Continuities, ed., Graham Meikle and Guy Redden (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
[3] Seth C. Lewis, Kelly Kaufhold and Dominic L. Lasorsa, “Thinking About Citizen Journalism,” Journalism Practice, 4, no. 2 (2010): 163-179. doi:10.1080/14616700903156919
[4] Jay Rosen, “A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism,” PressThink, July 14, 2008. http://archive.pressthink.org/2008/07/14/a_most_useful_d.html
[5] Andrew Van Dam, “Wait, does America really still employ a ton of news reporters?”, The Washington Post, July 12, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/07/12/news-reporters-journalism-jobs-census/
[6] Doug Muder, “Expand Your Vocabulary: News Desert,” The Weekly Sift, December 5, 2011.https://weeklysift.com/2011/12/05/expand-your-vocabulary-news-desert/
[7] Laura S. Washington, “The Paradox of Our Media Age – and What to Do About It,” In These Times, April 5, 2011. https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-paradox-of-our-media-ageand-what-to-do-about-it
[8] Errin Haines, “Darnella Frazier, the teen who filmed George Floyd’s murder, wins honorary Pulitzer,” The 19th, June 11, 2021. https://19thnews.org/2021/06/darnella-frazier-teen-filmed-george-floyds-murder-wins-honorary-pulitzer/
[9] Michael Roberts, “The Message,” Westword, April 21, 2005. https://www.westword.com/news/the-message-5084447
[10] Michael Roberts, “YourHub.com: A local-media success story,” Westword, August 6, 2009. https://www.westword.com/news/yourhubcom-a-local-media-success-story-5899731
[11] HuffPost, “Citizen Journalism Publishing Standards, April 15, 2009. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/14/citizen-journalism-publis_n_186963.html
[12] Lydia Polgreen, “Introducing HuffPost Opinion And HuffPost,” HuffPost, January 18, 2018. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/huffpost-opinion-huffpost-personal_n_5a5f6a29e4b096ecfca98edb
[13] City Bureau. The documenters network. https://www.citybureau.org/documenters