Paul Sullivan is a longtime journalist and former editor of what used to be a citizen journalism site: Orato.com. This transcript is part of an interview with Ira Basen for the CBC Radio Sunday Edition documentary News 2.0. Series air date on CBC Radio: Sunday, June 21 and Sunday, June 28, 2009.
IB: So tell me about Orato.com? What is it? Why is it? How did it start? What's the story behind it?
PS: Orato means "I speak" in Latin and the idea was to create a platform for people to bear witness in the first person. I was always keen on the idea of the first person because I think it's the easiest way to tell a story. It's this is what happened to me and it's in some ways the most honest way to tell a story.
I don't want to over simplify but it allows people to have a natural narrative structure that they might not always have, otherwise they have to get into the pyramid style or some other kind of foreign structure that's very intimidating. The whole traditional journalism, all the rubric and stuff attached to traditional journalism is very intimidating for ordinary people and in some ways it's exciting but ordinary people also I think need to be able to join in a public conversation and it's been very difficult to do that because they don't control the means of information product right?
But now there's no excuse. Everybody is online; everybody can interact at any time of the day or night. One of the things that…well, there's a lot of knowledge, there's a lot of wisdom, there's a lot of expertise, a lot of information in our communities that for one reason or another hasn't been tapped and I think that citizen journalism is the mechanism by which that information will be gathered and disseminated and it adds great value to the public conversation.
IB: Now you've sort of answered this already but what was the gap you were trying to fill with Orato? What was missing out there that you think needed to be filled with this?
PS: The voices of people who aren't official journalists and the information that they bring to the table, the thoughts, ideas, reflections that they have to contribute. It was classic when I was in the newspaper business or in the radio business or in the television business; we'd all have something called "talk back or feed back or letters to the editor" in which at the end of the week we'd feature three or four people's voices; letter to the editor - four or five people a day.
There are hundreds of thousands of people that have ideas, that have contributions to make, that have stories to tell that just weren't getting into any of the traditional media or any of the mainstream media and I've always thought that that's a rich source of information that we need to have and we weren't getting it. Pollsters were providing, if you like, the vox populi through a very I don't know limited mechanism that's very unsatisfying and "add your comments at the end" can be processed and aggregated in a really powerful way now so that that information is accessible.
I think the thing about citizen journalism is it buttresses the democracy; it strengthens the democracy by making it more and more difficult to control or limit the mechanism of expression.
The other thing is that yes, there is a huge prejudice among journalists about the customer or the reader or the viewer or the visitor or the audience or whoever they are. There is some kind of a amorphous of differentiated mass of idiots if we're going to be honest and I've always really hated that a lot and chaff against it because I don't know my own proclivities if you like have been to communicate with people out there but just by saying "out there" alone sort of draws a metaphorical line between us and them and there is no " us and them" really. I mean it's okay to be trained, it's okay to be skillful, it's wonderful to be talented, all of those things are very important but that doesn't mean that the value of the information and the people who aren't trained, skilled and talented isn't important as well or that they need to have the means to express it. Plus there are all kinds of skill and talent and information that we're missing, lots of it. There are all kinds of arguments for why we shouldn't let ordinary people practice journalism or something like that and I can argue about each one of those because as far as I'm concerned they're all specious, they're all designed to create or to sustain a sense of elite information masters that's spurious right?
IB: But what you're talking about is really kind of the gatekeeper function of journalism right? That there's a gate and we will tell you whether you can walk through that gate or not and that seems to be what you're sort of ramming against…
PS: We've got rules junior!
IB: Okay, but you were for many years the ultimate gatekeeper. How do you square that?
PS: I was "Mr. Gatekeeper" yeah, you know "I once was lost and now I'm found" "I was blind but now I see". Well, I don't know I'm not sure that I had the personality to be the gatekeeper, I kept letting people in, I kept letting things in and other things out. A real gatekeeper hoards and I'm not a good hoarder. A good gatekeeper builds standards and codes of behaviour and all of that kind of stuff and frankly I kept looking for ways to break the rules, not make the rules. So I would keep moving from gate to gate to try and figure out what was going on here and the more time I spent opening and closing gates, the less inclined I was to do that.
IB: But is there anything legitimate about the gatekeeper function?
PS: I'm thinking…uhm, is there anything legitimate about the gatekeeper function? That's if you make species equivalencies such as "the gate equals the truth". I'm not sure that there's any value to that equivalency. Now this is not to say that there aren't skilled communicators and there but if you argue that the best thing to do is to get all the skilled communicators in a room together and have them tell me things and decide what I'm qualified to know and what I'm not qualified to know, I'm not sure that that's the right idea.
IB: But does the gate not help weed untruth? I mean that's one of the philosophical underpinnings of the gate is that through this process, we will be able to get the best available version of the truth. At least it's the best way of getting that.
PS: Well, that's the last line of defense isn't it? That's the last resort of a desperate community. I'm not sure whether it's true or not. I'd like to tell a story about a story; can I do that?
IB: Okay, but first…you must of while you were a gatekeeper, you must have blocked out a lot of stuff that was not true and you must have in the process of being an editor you must have made lots of things a lot better and yet you seem to see now no value in that. Even at the conference I saw you at, you lamented the number of trees that were killed in pursuit of your journalistic career. I mean there must have been some value in what you did all those years.
PS: Well, I'm sure that this would not make me popular with all of my ex-colleagues but most of the things that I did were internal. I would prevent people or try to prevent people or encourage people to tell the truth as opposed to what they were doing and what they were doing was they were pursuing a point of view or they were trying to tell a story with a motive. All of the kinds of stuff that ordinary people do all the time only its not sanctioned, it's not glorified as truth telling. It's just what they think, it's their opinion and so 99% of the stuff that would come over the transom was, as far as I could tell, relatively well constructed opinion but that's all it was. I mean you get some guy, he talks to…he decides what to emphasize in the story, he decides who to talk to, he decides what facts to leave in, what facts to leave out and I would negotiate with him.
I would say "well no I think these facts are more important then those facts" so we'd have a little fact find and sometimes I'd prevail, sometimes I'd go to the wall and say no, no, I want it that way and sometimes I wouldn't. I'd give him something but it was a negotiated truth at best and it was between two people who were trapped in their social, cultural, economic and political skins and we were those lenses and that's what we saw.
Some guy came in from left field let's say or never mind a guy, a woman from left field, left field being I don't Indo-Canadian community somewhere and they start talking about how we're all a bunch of racists and we don't understand what we're talking about, we would try to eradicate that irritation. Sometimes…we'd try to do it politically correctly because that's how we behaved, we were civilized
