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Sam Freedman’s “Outside Voices” column on this site a few weeks ago, which discussed the advent of "citizen journalism," caused quite the blogospherical stir. In a Q&A with Poynter’s Chip Scanlan, Freedman reacts to the reaction.

Scanlan: You're tough on bloggers, FOX News and citizen journalists. As a former New York Times reporter and tenured professor at Columbia Journalism School, what separates you from charges that you're an elitist scold?

Freedman: I don't mind being called an elitist if being an elitist means being the best, not being snooty and effete. When I hear people complain about the elite, I always ask them if they'd like to apply their principle to sports. Let's have an NFL season with only mediocre players, because all those elitists like Tom Brady and Donovan McNabb are ruining the game. Somehow people don't mind the elite all of a sudden. I don't think an amateur is as qualified as a professional in journalism. There are qualified journalists and scholars whose blogs I do read -- Juan Cole on the Middle East, Andrew Sullivan on social and political issues, Gregg Easterbrook on football. But in their cases, the blog is simply an alternative delivery system. These people write out of a body of research, if not for every posting, then certainly over the course of a career. But to just sit down and write your opinions or harvest the day's gossip -- that's not journalism, even if it is momentarily chic. As for FOX, it's a fascinating political movement, but it's not a news organization in any way I recognize. If that's scolding, then I'm guilty as charged.

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Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. After I read his recent book, Letters To A Young Journalist, I asked the author, Samuel Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University and an education columnist for The New York Times, to contribute this week. (You can buy his book -- which, as I young journalist, I highly recommend to young journalists -- here.) Below, he discusses the rise of "citizen journalism," and how it compares to traditional journalism as we know it. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices. Here's Sam:

The other afternoon, I clicked onto the Web site YouTube.com. True to its motto, “Broadcast Yourself,” the site allows people to upload their own videos on a nearly infinite array of subjects. I happened to be looking for clips about American soldiers in Iraq, and a quick search summoned up more than a thousand hits.

In just the first half-dozen, I saw a wide array of images – roadside bombs exploding, tanks rolling across the desert, lines of artillerymen firing, flag-draped coffins, an injured GI being evacuated, a bored GI playing air guitar on a shovel as he did a Chuck Berry duck-walk beside a coil of barbed wire. The videos had been set to music ranging from rap to acapella gospel to thrash metal to Pink Floyd.

As both a journalist and a citizen, I valued these insights into a controversial war. I valued them as testimony, not unlike the V-mail my uncle sent to his family during his three years in World War II, not unlike the fuzzy home movies of John Kerry’s Swift Boat crew during Vietnam. Where I differ from a growing number of scholars and media critics, however, is in considering the uploads on YouTube to be journalism.

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