Citizen Journalists Needed
Look back. The last time our poorest faced such overwhelming problems in this country was the Great Depression. We hear that all the time. What we don’t hear with any great regularity is that a community of writers, photographers, artists, and folklorists organized around this 1930s economic disaster to illuminate the crisis and make it impossible to ignore. We don’t hear an admission from journalists that they’re too underfunded and unmotivated to flood the public imagination with images of a homeless population that far surpasses the Great Depression’s at its worst. We don’t hear is that families and children are still suffering deeply because of the loss of a socially responsible (or even aware) community of journalists.
Then whose responsibility is it to document these problems? Who steps up to the plate if the people getting paid to uncover this Great Recession are shilling for Shell Petroleum, etc?
We do.
The continued development of a robust and critically engaged community of citizen journalists would undoubtedly be an aid to stemming the tide of homelessness in the United States. But let’s step back for the moment. By citizen journalism I don’t mean the same thing, maybe, as what’s usually discussed. Citizen journalism as reported by corporate media outlets usually means that you create the content then give it away to large organizations that profit by way of web traffic from the work you’ve done. A version of citizen journalism that strives to do more than save money for dying news outlets means a cell phone camera, a social conscience, a web community like Change.org or whatever, and your own dedication to fighting for the country’s most vulnerable.