The idea of citizen journalism, which is also known as "public, or "street" journalism, is based upon us, as public citizens playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and giving out news and different kinds of information.
We should never confuse citizen journalism with community journalism or civic journalism because those are both practiced by PROFESSIONAL journalist, which we are not.
We are making citizen journalism much easier with social networking. You can put something on Twitter or Facebook, like a Yahoo link or something from your school newspaper; having a cell phone made journalism more accessible to people worldwide.
Because of this "availability" of technology, a citizen like you or me can often report BREAKING NEWS to Twitter or Facebook much more quickly than traditional media reporters.
Essentially, everyone has the ability to do what professional reporters do, but without getting paid...but all they're doing is reporting information, and that is easy enough, right? Even this blog for instance, this is reporting about what citizen journalism is. I'm essentially being a reporter for my professor by defining citizen journalism. Where is my paycheck?
There are people who do get noticed from their citizen journalism. They either have blogs or podcasts, and end up getting found by very important people, and end up making it big by setting up a blog about crafting, or telling funny jokes; like P.S. I Made This, or Jenna Marbles for instance.
So... how do you find out your news?
I find out most of my news from Twitter anyways...who needs a TV or the news anyway?
What do you think about people's general use of social media? Are we using it efficiently?
ReplyDeleteInteresting poem. Hopefully you learn everything you need to learn :).