2 posts tagged “citizen journalism”

With Barack Obama having announced his intentions to run for president on YouTube, the campaign before the campaign is starting to heat up. Recently John Edwards invited citizen journalists and bloggers to join him on the campaign trail. As I had mentioned in an earlier post, A-list blogger Robert Scoble was part of the gang and interviewed the Senator about his intentions. And the McCains and Clintons will follow as the pressure continues to build to include bloggers, vloggers, wiki producers, podcasters and OhMyNews journalists as a target audience.

The media has always been a major part of a presidential race. This time, it'll even be bigger. In our day day and age, almost everybody can be a (citizen) journalist or a publisher of news and information. The number of influencers has skyrocketed.

So, if I am not sure who to believe and, in the end, vote for - who do I listen to along the way? The political correspondent of a big time newspapers, the same person on his or her personal blog which expresses more personal opinions, my neighborhood podcast where Suzie, my neighbor voices her political views, the campaign ads on TV which I mute anyway or the wannabe political videogapher on YouTube who gives me his or her two cents about each candidate?

Let me know. I'd be curious to find out!

First let me say, that I like Robert Scoble and his blog and show. He seems the "real thing" and quite authentic and he's livin' the American 2.0 dream.

But I don't think that he did John Edwards or himself any favor by publishing the John Edwards interview.
Why? Here are my two cents:

• To start off with a questions: "Who are you?" clearly shows that Robert Scoble is not a journalist. I know he doesn't claim to be but asking a presidential candidate who he is doesn't really reflect well on Robert's IQ. It definitely gets a zero on the journalistic IQ scale.
  
• As a result of the opening question, John Edwards is taken aback, doesn't quite know what to say and looks insecure and a bit embarrassed for Robert. Exactly how a candidate wants to look like a good 24 hours after he announced his candidacy!
• Then Robert fires away the second question "What do you do?" which causes John Edwards to make even more facial expression that don't become him too well. Yes, he looks young and casual but does he want to look goofy?
• At that point, I stopped watching the video. I also got annoyed by the sound of the engine and the unsteady video that cut off John Edwards' forehead.

Later on I watched the whole thing and there's some more interesting stuff coming and yes, better questions leading to better answers. But do viewers even get to this point?

Jeremiah Owyang says that the next presidential election will be fought on online. That might well be true but John Edward's smart move to invite citizen journalists and bloggers along the campaign trail might have ramifications on his reputation. Oh yes, it makes him seem open and not worried about people finding out who the real John Edwards is and what he stands for. But being a nice, open, transparent guy just isn't enough for the job. Or is it? We'll see how Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will handle the social mediasphere.