Citizen journalism or personal media?

While I’ve been on the road this week, over at E-Media Tidbits they’ve been debating whether to call it citizen journalism, personal media (my term) or something else.

The handful of people who posted here seem fond of the journalism label (most of them are journalists). I think they’re mistaken. The vast majority of bloggers, and the vast majority of people creating podcasts, video blogs and other forms of personalized first-person media don’t consider themselves journalists. Yes, they sometimes cross over into journalism, as when Steve Garfield interviewed me for Rocketboom and Akimbo this week. But what they’re really doing is taking part in the personal media revolution. They’re taking up the tools of digital creativity, which allows them not just to create and tell stories but to share those works of personal media with a global audience. Push-button publishing is accurate as well, but focusing on the distribution mechanism is almost always limiting — and wrong, in this era of media convergence.

So, I come back again to personal media. We create our own stories and share them with the world. Sometimes, it’s journalism. Usually, it’s not.

By the way, “the personal media revolution” was the expression repeated at KRON’s blogger meet-up last weekend, and elsewhere. But I’ve got no problem with citizens media as a synonym.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.