By Lisa Grace and Christopher Petras

Within the past decade, news consumption has shifted dramatically from the traditional media triad of television, radio, and print newspapers to digital platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, YouTube, and many others. Gone are the days when newspaper editors and television news directors served as the guardians to the gates of news content and dissemination.

Today, any private individual with a video camera, access to mobile devices, and personal and public computers can become a journalist and disseminate information as news, in real time, to millions of individuals globally, at little or no cost. Public safety incidents this past summer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Falcon Heights, Minnesota, are among those that illustrate the significance of how private individuals—citizen journalists—can shape the way local governments and their policing efforts are viewed by the public in the digital age.

With the expansion of how information is distributed has come the accessibility of information, where individuals presenting information as news often do so with little or no editorial oversight nor the guidance of professional codes of journalistic ethics, as taught in higher educational journalism programs.

Plus, the number of individuals using digital platforms like Twitter and Facebook to publicize personally-generated information as news and promote their viewpoints has increased. Navigating local government information successfully can be daunting when residents take news reporting into their own hands and use the digital platforms to define local governments.

This means that managers and public information officers (PIOs) must quickly and in real-time sort fact from fiction to mitigate the negative effects of misinformation on local government operations, including local public safety efforts.

Citizen vs. Traditional Journalist

Citizen journalists range from the hobbyist who writes personal opinions in the comment sections of online news publications to the semiprofessional who works directly with traditional media and contributes personal insights and firsthand evidence for use in a news story.

They can differ from traditional journalists because they typically work for themselves and not as freelance or in-house journalists. They also create and often publish news on their personal blogs that typically are not affiliated with any traditional news outlets, and they can play a chameleon role, sometimes portraying themselves as objective news reporters when their underlying purpose can be to advocate for a political or personal cause.

They are similar to traditional journalists because they gather data, whether primary—personal video footage—or secondary—from another source—and distribute the data as news or as supporting material to a news story. They also have economic incentives to publish information that tugs at the emotional strings of residents and evokes feelings toward an issue or incident.

In our opinion, the rise in digital news consumption and citizen journalists has resulted in the creation of a new business-of-news paradigm that has significant ramifications for local government operations.

The New Standard

Digital news consumption has pushed news organizations to adopt digital platforms to sustain economic longevity. CNN, FOX News, and MSNBC, for example, have incorporated Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube into their news operations for real-time, cost-efficient, and audience-rich news dissemination.

At the same time, the networks are incorporating citizen journalists into their news functions for news ideas and on-the-scene accounts, including personal video and photos of an incident or event, which has happened with the Ferguson, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, and Falcon Heights police incidents.

This “professionalization” of citizen journalists finds managers and PIOs facing a cadre of private individuals who can have journalistic skills equal to, and in some cases greater than, those of the traditional journalist who possesses a two- or four-year journalism degree.

Montclair State University’s Center for Cooperative Media in New Jersey, for example, offers workshops on topics that include social media, investigative reporting, how to use news archives, and starting a news website. The workshops are posted online for anyone to access, and many of the workshops are open to the public.

International news outlets like CNN and the Guardian offer tutorials and news toolkits, including “CNN iReport” and “Guardian Witness,” respectively, to assist citizen journalists prepare and submit videos, stories, and photos for consideration for use in or as a news story.

Thus, the integration of citizen journalists finds managers and PIOs operating where consumers are shifting to digital news; where little or no editorial oversight exists nor guidance in using professional journalistic codes of ethics; where advertisers are concurrently shifting customer targeting and marketing efforts toward digital; and news organizations are going digital to increase ratings and recapture customers and advertiser dollars.

Proactive Information Management

With managers tracking and disseminating information about their local governments among a multitude of digital platforms in real-time, sorting fact from fiction in order to stop or mitigate misinformation about an incident can seem excruciating challenging, with staff asking “Where do I start?”

Effectively managing news and information related to public safety and other local government services requires staff to build more collaborative digital information management systems, starting with employees agreeing who among their team or group will serve as the spokesperson for all media and resident inquiries.

This is imperative for keeping messages consistent when informing the media and the public about local incidents. Once the spokesperson is established, team members must then create a digital information plan to gather, to analyze, and to share digital information during, and in some cases prior, to a local incident or crisis.

These steps and information management tools can help staff sort fact from fiction and successfully navigate the facts to media and to the public in a rapid-response manner:

1. Conduct a digital information scan. Discovering digital news and information pertaining to a local government is easier when digital tools are used that help with the monitoring process. Digital monitoring apps, including “Research.ly” and “Sentiment140,” allow tracking of Twitter discussions. Similarly, YouTube Charts allows the tracking of video information posted on YouTube.

Digital dashboards like Hootsuite and Parse.ly organize information and discussions on a topic like a police incident all at one site, while tools, including “rbutr,” track criticisms about news or news-related stories for greater information management.

2. Assess the accuracy and reliability of the information. With citizen journalists, new questions have surfaced on objectiveness in news reporting using information like personal video footage, particularly with regard to police-related incidents.

Once digital information scanning is complete, data must be assessed for accuracy and reliability. Here is what can be done to enhance accuracy and reliability assessment efforts:

Determine the source of the information. Find out who manages the digital news and information platform. Websites typically indicate if they are administered by an individual or webmaster (private company). The site will direct inquiries to either an individual e-mail or webmaster address.

If, for example, a Web page is maintained by a webmaster, finding the source of the information may be more challenging versus locating an individual who personally manages the website content and narratives.

Tracking the domain location and URL using such programs as Google Analytics may help in locating the source of digitally disseminated information.

Determine the type of data used to support the content and narrative of the digital news or information. Is the data primary or secondary? In other words, did the citizen journalist personally collect the data (i.e., personally videotape an event) used in a news story, making the data primary, or did the citizen journalist rely on other sources for the data (using video footage or data from another source) making the data secondary?

Data derived from a single source (primary data) are more reliable. Data derived from outdated studies or surveys, for example, may not accurately and reliably reflect current opinions and socioeconomic conditions. Determining the timeliness of data is important for assessing accuracy and reliability. 

Determine the purpose of the information. The reader of the information must assess if the facts provided are verifiable; for example, are sources provided? Does the author of the information ask the reader to join a philosophical cause and donate to a philosophical cause?

Separating objective facts from subjective opinions provide managers and PIOs with a clearer picture of the intent of the news or information.

3. Engage in rapid-response updates and messaging. Quashing misinformation before it is disseminated to the public and providing accurate and reliable facts in real time is crucial for lessening disruptions to local service delivery and maintaining a community’s brand and good reputation.

Staying ahead of the curve through rapid-response updates and corrections to factual errors using digital press releases and news advisory tools, including Facebook Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Faxage, PRNewswire, Twitter, and Telegram, provides real-time information dissemination capabilities that compliment non-digital tools like fax machines.

Digital information management tools, including mobile device and cellphone apps, facilitate the dissemination process with digital databases of local residents and media outlets similar to radio listeners and television viewers, who download free news and weather applications from their favorite television and radio news stations to obtain news and weather updates in real time.

Residents who voluntarily provide their e-mail addresses for notifications represent another example of how practical, online, rapid-response tools can be used for real-time news.

The uncertainty of digital technology makes local government public relations during times of crisis more challenging. The digital age has created this new type of journalist and a new standard where facts and fiction intermingle online at times, serving as an economic incentive for both private citizens and news media outlets.

Working together with residents and media outlets, local governments can track digital information in real-time and harness misinformation, while at the same time distribute accurate facts that reduce disruptions to local operations.

Lisa Grace is a retired police sergeant who had been with a Michigan public safety department (grace.lrg@gmail.com), and Christopher Petras is a management, marketing, and media adviser in Michigan who also serves as an independent consulting producer for network affiliate television programs.