Smalltime Reporters, Bigtime Citizens: Songshan Community College’s Local Voices

In a classroom at Song­shan Community College, lecturer Chen Shu­min of the school’s ­PeoPo Citizen Journalism Club is writing, “Who, what, when, where, why, how?” on the whiteboard, explaining the basic principles of reporting to students with no experience in news gathering. And as the students stare at their computer screens, practicing uploading video files, there’s someone on the side treating the classroom like a news scene, practicing shooting photos.

Among these citizen journalists, there’s no lack of students in their fifties eager to share what they’ve learned from their latest news gathering efforts. Club member Ms. Ma mentions her first reporting attempt: she was planning to interview a local shopkeeper, but was overcome by shyness, not daring to speak, and pacing back and forth outside the shop for ages. Her bashful confession to the class drew titters from the other club members. Lisa, twice president of the Citizen Journalism Club, talked about her first time practicing doing news production: in the midst of the hustle and bustle she accidentally uploaded a blank file to the Internet. It was quite mortifying!

However, over time they all showed significant progress. After six years of effort, this motley crew of students became citizen journalists with local perspectives and the ability to take real action.

Songshan Community College’s citizen journalists scour their communities for topics of local concern, such as the environment and disadvantaged people, using their iPads and cameras to take down stories both large and small.

In 2007, Song­shan Community College’s first class in journalism drew more than 20 students. Filled with enthusiasm, they formed the ­PeoPo Citizen Journalism Club the following semester. Since then, these citizen journalists have completed over 1,000 audiovisual news reports on just about every topic imaginable.

Early on, to persuade journalism students to actually produce stories, SCC computer class lecturer Chen Shu­min encouraged the students, who were unfamiliar with computer video editing or news coverage, to keep in mind the idea that “your little story is my big scoop.” Using readily available cell phone and camera video functions, they could shoot stories in their neighborhoods and then add voiceovers and subtitles during postproduction, creating vivid video reports on human interest topics.

The class also taught students how to use the resources of Public Television Service’s ­PeoPo Citizen Journalism website, encouraging them to upload their video reports. By means of the Internet’s strength in information dissemination, they could attract more people’s attention, and possibly even influence public policy.

Public Television Service (PTS) inaugurated the ­PeoPo Citizen Journalism website in 2007. ­PeoPo, short for “People Post,” aims to achieve diverse reporting through independent journalistic efforts by the public at large.

Motivated by PTS, the journalism students of Taiwan’s community colleges began going out into their communities, pursuing topics such as the hardships experienced by elderly people living alone and the barriers that handicapped people have to deal with. And as they went out in search of news, they also played the role of overseeing things like the construction quality of local roads and the progress of repairs of public facilities. Today, the community colleges have graduated nearly 1,000 trained citizen journalists.

Song­shan Community College president Tsai Su-chen believes that besides giving students the chance to report on topics concerning local communities and to influence public policy, the founding of the Citizen Journalism Club also gives them the means to dig up many stories about people and nature. Their work has helped Taiwan’s tourism industry develop travel itineraries of greater quality and refinement, chock-full of intrigue. “Tourism in Taiwan is no longer limited to the ‘Big Four’ (Tai­pei 101, Jan­fu­sun Fancy­world, Leo­foo Village, and the Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village). Instead, they’ve been developing destinations with more local flavor, as well as numerous ‘micro-tourism’ itineraries,” says Tsai.

Unlike the mainstream media, citizen journalists are rooted in the local, and can dig up topics that the traditional media are unable to attend to, and even turn the tables by becoming leaders of public opinion.

Fifty-eight-year-old Zhou Dian­sheng, who goes by the pen name “Papa Zhou,” once produced an exclusive story on China Airlines pilot Jesse Wang’s efforts to rescue stray dogs. The mainstream media even followed up this report.

While sitting in the cockpit during a business trip to mainland China, Zhou overheard Wang mention spending NT$1 million in one year to save stray dogs. Deeply touched, he grabbed his video camera to record this story.

The report was about how pilot Wang, whose annual income is nearly NT$3 million, scrimped and saved, preferring to keep driving his 20-year-old car, in order to spend a third of his income to save stray dogs scheduled to be euthanized. After the report was published online, it caught the attention of netizens, and in two short days it saw over 1,000 views. Not even a week later, this figure surged to 20,000, a record for the PeoPo Citizen Journalism website. Soon thereafter, mainstream media outlets such as TVBS and Apple Daily picked up the story, and this triggered a great reverberation. “It was a true sense of achievement,” says Zhou.

Over many years, community college journalism classes have given citizen journalists concerned about local issues the means to transmit their diverse perspectives and join forces to become a new grassroots movement that can change Taiwan’s society.