Navigate
X
    Mark Glaser
  • 13 years ago
    • Categories: Culture

How should the military respond to citizen journalism in the field of combat?

Ever since the advent of U.S. military personnel blogging about their experiences in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military brass has been in a conundrum. Do they allow these eye-opening first-person accounts from the front lines, or do they try to rein them in to keep control over the storylines of the Iraq War? Not only are milblogs providing first-person text accounts of war, but there are also photos and video streaming in from the front lines as never before. (See this MediaShift guide to soldier videos from Iraq.)

I recently received a question on this topic from Chris Eder, a broadcast journalist for the Air Force who blogs at AFNBroadcaster. “The Air Force’s #1 weakness is telling a timely story, and its #1 strength is telling an accurate story,” Eder said. “Citizen journalism’s #1 strength is telling a timely story. Given these restraints, how do you think the Air Force could best leverage all of these voices to tell one message?” Good question and one I will put to you, dear MediaShift readers. How should the Air Force and the rest of the U.S. military deal with citizen journalism among soldiers? Should they just filter posts that could give away strategy or soldier locations? Is it something they should embrace, and how? Share your thoughts in the comments below and I’ll run the best ones in the next Your Take Roundup and send them to Eder.

Tags: department of defensejournalismmilitarysecuritysoldier videos
Mark Glaser :Mark Glaser is founder and executive director of MediaShift. He contributes regularly to Digital Content Next’s InContext site and newsletter. Glaser is a longtime freelance journalist whose career includes columns on hip-hop, reviews of videogames, travel stories, and humor columns that poked fun at the titans of technology. From 2001 to 2005, he wrote a weekly column for USC Annenberg School of Communication's Online Journalism Review. Glaser has written essays for Harvard's Nieman Reports and the website for the Yale Center for Globalization. Glaser has written columns on the Internet and technology for the Los Angeles Times, CNET and HotWired, and has written features for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Entertainment Weekly, the San Jose Mercury News, and many other publications. He was the lead writer for the Industry Standard's award-winning "Media Grok" daily email newsletter during the dot-com heyday, and was named a finalist for a 2004 Online Journalism Award in the Online Commentary category for his OJR column. Glaser won the Innovation Journalism Award in 2010 from the Stanford Center for Innovation and Communication. Glaser received a Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and currently lives in San Francisco with his wife Renee and his two sons, Julian and Everett. Glaser has been a guest on PBS' "Newshour," NPR's "Talk of the Nation," KALW's "Media Roundtable" and TechTV's "Silicon Spin." He has given keynote speeches at Independent Television Service's (ITVS) Diversity Retreat and the College Media Assocation's national convention. He has been part of the lecture/concert series at Yale Law School and Arkansas State University, and has moderated many industry panels. He spoke in May 2013 to the Maui Business Brainstormers about the "Digital Media Revolution." To inquire about speaking opportunities, please use the site's Contact Form.

View Comments (2)

  • First of all I wouldn't be a good journalist if I didn't correct the message. The AF's #1 weakness quote is my opinion, not AF fact. I crafted that statement as a catalyst to justify citizen journalism in the AF.

    Dear MediaShift Reader-
    I look forward to your ideas!

  • Heh. Nice application of Rule No. 8.

    I don't really think the Air Force should be trying to "leverage" their airmen's messages. As soon as Big AF started to appear to grant semi-official status to a milblogger, I think that blogger would lose some credibility and independence.

    I think the best thing the AF can do is to stay out of our way so long as we don't compromise OPSEC or run afoul of the UCMJ.

Comments are closed.

    Related Post
  1. How EconoFact Advocates for Truth in an Anti-Fact Era

    Born of a desire to insert actual facts into the heated debates surrounding the 2016…

  2. 7 Reasons Why News Startups Fail

    Startups possess great potential to improve journalism. In theory, they can be the sites where…

  3. Journalists Covering White Supremacists Must Weigh Risks to Selves and Families

    A version of this post originally appeared on CPJ’s website. Michael Edison Hayden was one…