The regulations that govern blogs and citizen journalism need to be rethought, says Robin Thomas, head of consumer digital at Weber Shandwick

Rupert Murdoch said a little while ago that technology is shifting the power from publishers and now it is the people who are in control. At Ad:Tech London last week, Microsoft stated that it was no longer a media owner, but a provider of media platforms. It has been clear for some time now that social graphs are driving conversation and the dissemination of stories. This is shifting more and more emphasis and focus from editors to consumers.

Social media is now used not only to deliver stories, but also to source and gather information to make stories richer. Lots of breaking articles are written with citizen journalists and bloggers in mind by having open comments to allow the story to grow organically through multiple voices.

However, the adoption of technology and the huge increase of citizen journalism now means that anyone with a connection can create a website and/or blog and, until someone can prove legally otherwise, publish anything that they want. In the past, several brands have had sites made up about them with URL’s such as sucks.com and have had these sites go viral with some becoming news stories in their own right. It is testament to how big an issue that this has become that brands now buy up these domains to pre-empt such activity.

It has not, however, just been brands who have fallen foul of social media. I am pretty sure that everyone witnessed the breaking of several super-injunctions through social media channels over the summer. To my knowledge, no one has been arrested for breaking the law and it was asked at the time “what are the police expected to do? Arrest 100,000 people?“

This is a fair comment. However, it does raise an interesting point. Most media houses and journalists (and I say this fully aware that certain traditional media houses and journalists have been accused of far greater crimes than this of late) still respect the law and the art they have studied for many years. The fact that no traditional press uncovered any of the people involved in the super-injunction stories, was probably more down to the fact that they would be sued, rather than journalistic integrity, but this is exactly the reason that traditional press in most circumstances have more gravitas. If writers stray there are editors on hand to impose journalist standards, the same cannot be assumed of all citizen journalists.

I am not saying for a second that citizen journalism is a bad thing – far from it. The fact that it, and other forms of social media, have and continue to both shape and define the way in which we create and consume stories is beyond reproach. And furthermore the fact that consumers are increasingly seeking out these forms of information is as much to do with the dwindling respect and trust for traditional media as it is for the information on offer. However, journalist integrity demands just that: integrity. And, while I disagree with MP Ivan Lewis’ recently unveiled proposals for licensing journalists, the regulations that govern blogs and citizen journalism need to be rethought or we risk devaluing the art of journalism.

But then again, is it really fair to call bloggers or citizens/consumers, journalists? I have never met a blogger who would call themselves a journalist and, to that extent, vice versa. So maybe it’s time, in this ever fragmented media landscape in which we live, where speed and thirst for information continues to grow exponentially, that we need some new guidelines. Guidelines based in the past, but that embrace the future and allow it to continually define and redefine itself.

Then, the art of journalism may just stand a chance.