Earlier this week, local community-based journalism site Sacramento Press learned of campaign fliers that cited an opinion piece appearing on its site. The fliers, which slam a Sacramento City Council candidate, simply quote “Sacramento Press” as saying local residents are “being hoodwinked, bamboozeled, led astray, run amok as it appears District One candidate, Angelique Ashby, goes with the Hustle and Flow of dirty politics.”
Sacramento Press staff members were quick to distance themselves from the fliers, writing in a prominently featured post, entitled “Political campaign fliers NOT from The Sacramento Press,”
The Sacramento Press had no part in it. We did not print the mailers. We did not write those words.
The post, written by managing editor Colleen Belcher, goes on to stress that the Sacramento Press “did not write or solicit the article.”
Now, a step back for those not familiar with Sacramento Press. The site has several editorial interns and paid staffers, which it identifies with small icons next to the poster’s name. But the site is based largely on community contributions. That is, anyone can post almost anything on the site – like the opinion piece quoted by the fliers. It’s a bold concept, and the site has received a good deal of attention. In a comment responding to discussion (including comments I posted) on the campaign fliers story, co-founder Ben Ilfield had this to say about the site’s policies:
Sounds nice, but this use makes it seem like this was an editorial or perhaps reporting. It was neither.
This kind of misleading tactic could be used for anyone who supports anything to simply write an opinion piece on the site and then produce a flier that implies we stand behind words we never wrote or solicited.
I know the graphic design of the site makes it look like a newspaper – and that is the easiest way to describe us, but we are new media and we act as a service provider when we allow community contribution through self publishing tools.
Ilfeld says that Sacramento Press provides a service for content creation, like an ISP or a newspaper allowing open comments (federal laws say that service providers can’t be held responsible for possibly libelous comments they allow through). But does saying that drop stories written by unpaid members of the community – the core principle of the site – on a second tier? Should community journalism websites take some kind of ownership of all content they host (assuming it isn’t libelous or inaccurate)? Does holding staff contributions in a higher regard somehow clash with the basic ethos of a citizen journalism website?
Perhaps Sacramento Press sees itself as a service provider, but the majority of casual users visiting the site likely go there for content, not for a service.
Sacramento Press staff members were quick to distance themselves from the campaign fliers, but if the quote had been attributed to “Rhonda Erwin, Sacramento Press contributor,” would it have caused as much heartburn? For the record, I think the fliers are quite deceptive, but as Ilfeld said in the comments, “there is a good debate to be had” about the position citizen journalism websites take on issues like this.
Disclosure: I went to school with some of the staffers at Sacramento Press, and I know Colleen Belcher on a professional level.
It’s easy to focus on how much journalism has changed in the past decade or so, and it’s a topic I love discussing. But I sometimes find myself forgetting the long history that a lot of publications and organizations have. For instance, I work for a paper that has published for more than 100 years.