Football fever knocked out the blog, but what better way to return than with an eye-opening German perspective on the citizen journalism trend? In the Berliner Zeitung – itself with GDR roots, now owned by private equity media group Mecom – Christian Sonntag digs into socialist media history and finds citizen journalists both in Lenin’s Soviet Union and in the German “Democratic” Republic. The East German “Volkskorrespondenten” wrote features, leading articles, short news and commentary, among other genres. Their texts were placed directly opposite editorial material. They even were allowed to be more critical of local developments than the professional journalists. Whereas today’s citizen journalists see themselves as alternatives to the established media, the GDR people’s correspondents were an integral part of the media landscape.
Though there were 20.000 registered GDR citizen journalists, few held out to the end in 1989, according to Sonntag. The distance between how people perceived reality and how the media portrayed grew too wide, and critical pieces stopped appearing in the press (via Netzeitung Altpapier).
