For years, Everett’s KSER radio station has opened its airwaves to volunteer DJs. Now it’s giving the microphone to citizen journalists interested in gathering and reporting news.
“We don’t want to be perceived as just a music station,” Ed Bremer, the public radio station’s news-public affairs director said. “We want to be perceived as a source of information, a source of news and be trusted.”
Next month, KSER (90.7 FM) is holding an open house at its downtown Everett studios to talk with people interested in forming a volunteer news team.
The station that covers much of Snohomish and Island counties hopes to begin airing news reports by the end of the year. Eventually, it aims to produce an hourlong weekly news magazine program.
Bremer says the broadcasts would fill a niche left by Seattle television and radio stations that tend to cover Snohomish and Island counties sporadically, mainly focusing on breaking news such as crimes, big fires and traffic accidents.
He envisions KSER news volunteers covering topical beats such as education, the environment, city government or whatever else interests them.
The station will educate volunteers on the fundamentals of media ethics and teach them how to interview and put together radio news stories. They will get access to tape decks, audio-editing software and training materials. Bremer said he will review content for quality and vet stories for accuracy.
Bremer said high school students with an interest in broadcast news or retired people with time and an interest in community affairs are welcome. Pretty much anyone who is committed to fairness, accuracy and balance, he said.
“We don’t want any tub-thumpers and we don’t want anybody with an axe to grind or an agenda,” he said. “If they want to do something like that, we have a segment called commentary. What we want is people who understand that journalism should be fair.”
One Puget Sound public radio station is already using citizen journalists to fill out its programming schedule and give listeners more news about their community.
KBCS (91.3 FM) at Bellevue Community College celebrated the second anniversary of its weekly show One World Report last week.
The hour-long show is hosted, edited, produced and reported by a hodgepodge of volunteers, including a retired professor, a few college students and a housewife.
What makes it work is the passion of its volunteers, said Joaquin Uy, public affairs director for the station.
“There are so many stories in the community, and the networks don’t always catch them all,” he said. “The beauty of community journalism is, it casts a wider net and gets stories that you can’t find anywhere else.”
Dan Gillmor, a former columnist at the San Jose Mercury News and author of “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism, by the People, for the People” said there are a number of ways citizen journalism has taken shape.
One notable example is the grainy cell phone video captured by a survivor of the London Underground bombings in July 2005; the video was picked up by networks and promptly fed to TVs around the world.
Another is the liberal blog Talking Points Memo that earlier this year helped drive the story about eight U.S. attorney firings when many news organizations were quiet on the issue. Its bloggers collected stories from readers across the country, until a more focused story emerged.
Minnesota Public Radio also uses this concept of “open-source” or “participatory” journalism with its Public Insight Network, which solicits information on various topics from thousands of listeners every week.
Citizen journalism can shed light on stories of international interest or get down to the neighborhood level of news that falls beneath the interest of newspapers and other traditional media outlets.
“It’s important to realize there are many forms of this,” Gillmor said. “We shouldn’t put it in a box that has the boundaries that traditional journalists would assert.”
Reporter David Chircop: 425-339-3429 or dchircop@heraldnet.com.
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