02.23.2010 at 5:07 pm | Have your say »

A new trend called citizen journalism

Photo by rsambrook/Flickr.com-CC

Citizen journalism is among the current buzzwords in the media industry. The advent of the internet and its byproducts like blogs and similar channels provided for this phenomenon – the public serving as news sources.

Citing the 2003 report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the future of News and Information, Wikipedia said citizen journalism is “the concept of members of the public playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information.”

It also defined citizen journalism as “a specific form of  citizen journalism as well as user generated content.”

“The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires,” the We Media  report said.

Citizen journalism vs. community journalism

Wikipedia said citizen journalism and community journalism is different with the latter defined as news coverage focused on a certain locality or area.

Most publishing houses and news websites are now using citizen journalists as part of their daily operation.

People can easily contribute news stories using their mobile phones – especially now that cellular phones have greater capacity to record audios and videos. Netizens, coined for people actively involved in the use of the internet, are also growing and so the number of citizen journalists from this sector.

In 2006, CNN established its IReport site that encourages the public to share their stories. This site, which in now integrated into the main CNN website enables the news agency to get user-generated contents like videos of conflicts in the Middle East. To date, CNN encourages its IReport contributors to submit more stories on ideas suggested by the news agency’s editors.

Recent contributions to CNN is an amateur video showing the burning Internal Revenue Service (IRS) building in Austin, Texas after a private plane crashed to it. Amateur videos from Haiti also informed worldwide audience about the extent of damage in that place as well as videos shared by people from Machu Picchu, Peru during a massive mud slide in the area.

Similarly, BBC recently introduced its Virtual Revolution program where the public can share videos, comments on these and suggest questions on interviewees like in usual blog sites.

Citizen journalism enabled the world to know and to see what really is happening around the world without the media agencies taking part in the gathering of news.

Criticisms

Amid these advantages some sectors raised some questions on these innovations.

The New York Times earlier said supporters of this kind of journalism are turning their back against traditional goal of objectivity with some others saying only trained journalists can understand the real meaning of journalism ethics.

It, however, has its own citizen journalism site called The Local, which was established as part of the company’s experiment to further serve the public by getting personal inputs from them.

The Local has a site dedicated for Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange counties of New Jersey and Fort Greene and Clinton Hill in Brooklyn, all of which are in the US.

All things have its respective advantages and disadvantages but this issue, in particular, has lots of things that need to be learned and discovered.

One important thing to note is even if some people don’t like this innovation it’s here to stay since the world wide web (www) and the internet continue to attract more people to explore more possibilities. (30)

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