'Ordinary' People in the News, before and after Web 2.0

Cardiff.
The next speaker at Future of Journalism is Jeroen de Keyser, whose interest is in how Web 2.0 has changed the presentation of ordinary people’s views in newspapers. Traditionally, journalists view citizens as sources only for anecdotal (eyewitness, vox pop) information; otherwise, they prefer elite actors as sources. As a result, few everyday citizens are visible in news output, and they are mostly positioned to be of low importance.

Web 2.0 has changed this situation somewhat, both through the introduction of citizen journalism practices and by making a wider range of everyday sources available to journalists. Does this lead to ‘ordinary peoople’ appearing more often and more prominently, then?

Jeroen undertook a content analysis of five daily papers in Flanders (two quality, two tabloid papers from three different companies), comparing samples of their news coverage from 2001 (pre-Web 2.0) and 2011. All articles which included ordinary citizens (through quotes or mentions) were included in the dataset.

The findings show that the number of articles involving ordinary citizens increased (even in spite of the shrinking overall amount of news being published), and the newspaper space devoted to them also increased. Similarly, the number of mentions per page also rose.

In two papers, the number of citizens per article, and the size of such articles, increased; those two papers belonged to the company that had experimented the most with participatory technologies in recent years. By contrast, the amount of space within articles dedicated to the discussion of citizens’ views rose in the quality papers, but declined in the tabloids. Further, in three of the papers, the amount of citizens mentioned in important news articles also increased. Again, Jeroen suggests that this may show the influence of participatory journalism.

So, ordinary citizens appear to have become more visible; this may be related directly to serious experimenting with participatory journalism tools. Overall, though, in spite of the general rise of mentions of ordinary citizens, this remains a shift in the margins – elite sources continue to be preferred.