CNN iReport- They Still Don't Get It

As free a press as we want it to be...

Journalism.co.uk reported today that CNN is going to launch an award for its iReports

Great that CNN has embraced, to some degree, the concept of the Citizen Journalist

Yet at heart they still don't get it.

They are still very much a conventional TV news operation - with crews and overpaid anchors reading copy - to which they have appended this rather ghettoized iReport.

This morning on NPR I heard that iReport aired 40 short iReport videos from Cairo, which is great, until I heard that they had received 1400 videos.  They would only air the ones that they had fact checked.

This takes time.

And it's a barrier.

Twitter does not 'fact check' tweets coming out of Cairo - or anywhere else for that matter.

The whole point of the web and of the video revolution is an open platform.

Well, CNN might argue - how do we know if it's true.

That's a good point.

You don't

The web ultimatey self-corrects. We don't seem to have this anxiety when it comes to twitter.

How do we know if the tweets coming out of Cairo or Teheran or Bahrain are 'true'

We don't

We just let them keep rolling on.

The problem here for CNN and others is the inherent belief that there is a difference between print and video

That video is somehow 'magical' and 'special' and must be protected.

As a culture video is fairly new to us.  We have, however, had more than 500 years with print - so we are used to it.

When we go to the supermarket and see a tabloid headline that screams BAT BOY FOUND ALIVE ON MARS we don't go nuts.

We go.... yeah....... how much was that soup.

We have a certain maturity with print that we now have to have with video.

We don't need Gristedes vetting to make sure every supermarket tabloid headline is fact checked before they expose their shoppers to it, and we don't need CNN fact checking every video that comes in. Just put 'em on the web. We'll figure it out.

Thanks