When I'm trying to get my news in the morning, I'm far more likely to log onto CNN.com than a citizen journalism Web site like PopularVoice.org. If I'm feeling nostalgic, I might even open a newspaper.
But maybe that's just me. It's hard to explain the existence of sites like PopularVoice without admitting that people are generally dissatisfied with news coverage.
But the problem of inadequate coverage has always been around. TV producers have always decided what you should watch, radio DJs have always decided what you should listen to and editors have always decided what you should read in the newspaper. And sometimes those decisions don't always coincide with what viewers really want. In fact, it's pretty much impossible to please everyone all the time.
When mainstream television programs were no longer relevant, public access was born. When people got sick of listening to pop music and DJs rambling, they created public radio. And when the newspaper coverage wasn't sufficient, the underground press took flight.
In this sense, the idea of the dissatisfied consumer, which has spawned citizen journalism, is nothing new. The technology, however, is. Instead of applying to be on public access television, anyone with a camcorder and a computer can post their own videos to the Web. Anyone with a camera built into their cell phone can take pictures and send them half-way across the world in a matter of seconds. I don't think any journalists panicked when Wayne's World's popularity skyrocketed in the early 1990s or when digital cameras became a mainstay in American culture, and they shouldn't panic now.
Change does not automatically equal death. Spoken word survived the invention of newspapers; newspapers survived the invention of the radio; the radio survived the invention of the television; and to think these forms of media will all be destroyed by the Internet is just plain naive.
Well, all those media survived but most were changed radically from what they once were. Radio being among the most dramatic.