A few weeks back, my classmates, my teacher, and I discussed citizen journalism and its effect on media. To begin, citizen journalists are regular people who take a role in collecting, reporting, and giving their news to the rest of the public. What makes them different from journalists is the fact that they are not actually journalists. It doesn’t matter if a journalist is off duty, being a journalist by profession eliminates you from being considered a citizen journalist. This is because journalists are educated in the field, have viable sources, and because it is their actual job. A citizen journalist must merely be a member of the public society. With the technology that is available today, it should be of no surprise that citizen journalism continues to take off. Through the use of social networks and other mediums, a citizen can easily break news to others. For example, if a high-school kid witnessed someone get hit by a car and the driver drive away, they could tweet something along the lines of, “OMG just saw a Ford pickup truck hit a student and take off down Main St!” It might not be another couple of hours before a real news agency or journalist gets wind of this story, but this one citizen journalist has already informed some of the public. This is why citizen journalism can be a really great way of collecting media. The first-hand witnesses that are there are undoubtedly going to leak the news first, so citizen journalism does a great job of delivering news quickly and conveniently. Also, citizen journalism adds a wide variety of perspectives on a given event or story. The public doesn’t have to worry as much on journalistic bias because they can gather information from multiple sources and make their own inferences on what’s credible. On the contrary, journalists criticize this form of journalism because they think that journalism is a professional discipline that can only be used by them. Journalists also believe that this method is completely unregulated and nobody is really certain of the “facts” behind the story. In general, journalists flat out believe that citizen journalism is amateurish, and the job of delivering news to the public should be left in the hands of the professionals. In my opinion, I see the perspectives from both sides of the argument. I think that citizen journalism is a great tool when it is used correctly. There have been plenty of times where a citizen journalist has given the public a breaking story in the blink of an eye. But there has also been plenty more times where one of them has completely fabricated or been wrong about a story. That is why I think that it’s beneficial to have citizen journalists out there, I just think we need to be more mindful that these people could literally be anyone, and we should be more skeptical.
As Told By Rossi 