Citizen Journalism
Mercede Johnston is the greatest citizen journalist in the world. For the moment, at any rate.
Oh, I don’t mean because she has any special literary talent or political insight. The subject of her latest blog is good enough, but nothing brilliantly original. Girls should not get pregnant when they are 14. Bristol Palin is not the greatest role model in the world. As to talent, she writes well enough. Her thoughts are coherent and she is reasonably literate. You don’t need to be Ernest Hemingway just to get your point across. I think even Ernest Hemingway would have agreed with that.
No, when I say greatest citizen journalist in the world, the emphasis is on the word citizen. She is not a professional journalist (yet – if she heads down that road, I wish her all the luck in the world), nor is she a professional politician. She is just an average 19 (ish, I’m not sure exactly) year old girl from a small town who happens to know some famous people and thus is in a position to give us the inside scoop. Which she manages to do without seeming catty, opportunistic or self-serving. She connects the real world to the political world and the other way around.
In her latest post, she used her camera phone to take pictures of grafitti on the walls (and seat, in one case) of a girl’s restroom in Wasilla. This is a place that Wolf Blitzer could not have gone into and a thing that Peggy Noonan never would have dreamed of doing. There are millions and millions of people out there who might have done it, but they couldn’t have got the pictures onto the internet and in front of a wide readership.
So, perhaps the thing that makes Mercede Johnston the world’s greatest citizen journalist (for now) is just her positioning. That’s O.K. That’s what citizen journalism is supposed to be all about.
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