Citizen Journalism

Posted on November 8, 2014

Citizen journalism is the idea of normal, everyday people in the general public playing an active role in the collection and presentation of news. This is done over social media sites online, like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram and Tumblr. Citizen journalism has been instrumental in changing the presentation of traditional news reporting. News reporting has gone from being a monologic broadcast media, to being one where anyone with a cameraphone and an internet connection can contribute to global news.

Citizen journalism is, for me, a sketchy topic. Its very hard to get into a discussion about citizen journalism without reflecting on the fact “well, sometimes it is good, but look at all these times when it was actually really bad”. There have been times where citizen journalism has started with “noble intentions” and ended in people getting blamed for a bombing.

There are some very divisive pros and cons of citizen journalism. The great thing about it is that you’re getting immediate news that is free from any political or social bias that a media outlet might have, and it is (hopefully) straight from the source. The downside of this is that traditional media outlets are fact-checked, citizen journalism is not. There are no gatekeepers, meaning that you are getting with citizen journalism is raw, unprocessed and not necessarily true or accurate information.

So how do we determine the accuracy of what we are reading?

Because of the immediacy of citizen journalism, traditional media outlets have been forced to adapt to compete with this. As Bruns touches on, traditional media outlets have taken to drawing on the work of citizen journalists, by aggregating and displaying lists of tweets, posts and photos from social media sites, it allows users to get the best of both words. The immediacy and candidness of citizen journalism, coupled with the trusted name of a traditional news outlet. This also allows news outlets to save money, as they need to employ less infield journalists and photojournalists. However that is another topic, for a much longer and angrier post.