Citizen Journalism

November 3, 2009 at 6:20 am (Uncategorized)

Citizen journalism is exactly what it sounds like. The official definition is “the concept of members of the public playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information.” In simple terms, it’s when everyday citizens observe, analyze, and report events that occur. The reason citizen journalism can relate to this course and the media is because the only way that citizen journalism is possible is through the media we’ve discussed in class. Everyday citizen can observe, analyze, and then report their stories on blogs, Twitter, or YouTube. The video TED, which was recommended for us to view, helped describe how citizen journalism can be used. Ted said that there was an earthquake in China that was for some people, fatal. The big story about this earthquake is that people in other areas knew that it was happening before the Chinese Government even knew. The Chinese people were twittering and posting videos about it while it was going on. This goes to show how much of an impact the media has on our society and how effective citizen journalism is.
I feel that citizen journalism is effective because no money is involved. The way that people upload videos, twitter, and blog is all free of charge. Because it is free of charge, the citizens who report events don’t get paid for their reporting’s. The benefit of this is that the citizens have nothing to gain, so they will give you the stories exactly how they see it. With citizen journalism there isn’t a rating scale to gain viewers and make more money. Citizen journalism is done by non journalist who gives people who haven’t gotten a degree in journalism a chance to experiment with writing. Even some people who have degrees in journalism do it so they don’t have to take orders from a boss and get to write what they want. Citizen journalism is a true freedom of speech. It has such free reign that china has banned it because it has made the Chinese government look bad.
I feel that citizen journalism is a good step for journalism. Journalism is growing and society loves getting new ways to being kept in the “loop”. Citizen journalism keeps society up to date on events and is getting the information fed to them through the eyes or an Average Joe, just like them. Our modern society is all about freedom of speech.
The whole idea of citizen journalism took off with Dan Gillmore. He used to be a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, but is now and has built a successful career on writing books on citizen journalism. He is like the God Father of citizen journalism and has influenced many writers to pursue citizen journalism. His most famous book was titled We The Media, which was about the incursion of citizen’s media on the corporate news organizations, and also incorporated the history and technologies involved. Even if you check out Dan’s webpage, you can understand that he has a full grasp on media and know how it can be used for citizen journalism.