CiTiZeN JoUrNaLiS

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presented by :AMBER BHAUMIK

InTrOdUcTioN

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.

"The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-

ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.“

Citizen journalism is a specific form of citizen media as well as user generated content.

The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own

or in collaboration with others.

TyPeS J. D. Lasica classifies media for citizen journalism into the

following types:• Audience participation (such as user comments attached to

news stories, personal blogs, photos or video footage captured from personal mobile cameras, or local news written by residents of a community)

• Independent news and information Websites (Consumer Reports, the Drudge Report)

• Full-fledged participatory news sites (NowPublic, OhmyNews, DigitalJournal.com, Blottr.com, GroundReport)

• Collaborative and contributory media sites (Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Newsvine)

• Other kinds of "thin media." (mailing lists, email newsletters)

• Personal broadcasting sites (video broadcast sites such as KenRadio).

HiStOrY

• Initially, discussions of public journalism focused on promoting journalism that was "for the people" by changing the way professional reporters did their work. According to Leonard Witt, however, early public journalism efforts were, "often part of 'special projects' that were expensive, time-consuming and episodic. Too often these projects dealt with an issue and moved on. Professional journalists were driving the discussion. They would say, "Let's do a story on welfare-to-work (or the environment, or traffic problems, or the economy)," and then they would recruit a cross-section of citizens and chronicle their points of view. Since not all reporters and editors bought into this form of public journalism, and some outright opposed it, reaching out to the people from the newsroom was never an easy task." By 2003, in fact, the movement seemed to be petering out.

• With today’s technology the citizen journalist movement has found new life as the average person can capture news and distribute it globally.

Who are citizen journalists?

• According to Jay Rosen, citizen journalists "the people formerly known as the audience," who "were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all. ... The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable."

• Public Journalism is now being explored via new media such as the use of mobile phones. Mobile phones have the potential to transform reporting and places the power of reporting in the hands of the public. Mobile telephony provides low-cost options for people to set up news operations.

• According to Mark Glaser, during 9/11 many eyewitness accounts of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center came from citizen journalists. Images and stories from citizen journalists close to the World Trade Center offered content that played a major role in the story.

• In 2004, when the 9.1-magnitude underwater earthquake caused a huge tsunami in Indonesia, news footage from many people who experienced the tsunami was widely broadcast.

Criticisms • Citizen journalists may be activists within the communities they write about. This has

drawn some criticism from traditional media institutions, which have accused proponents of public journalism of abandoning the traditional goal of 'objectivity'. Many traditional journalists view citizen journalism with some skepticism, believing that only trained journalists can understand the exactitude and ethics involved in reporting news.

• An academic paper by Vincent Maher, the head of the New Media Lab at Rhodes University, outlined several weaknesses in the claims made by citizen journalists, in terms of the "three deadly E's", referring to ethics, economics and epistemology.

• An article in 2005 by Tom Grubisich reviewed ten new citizen journalism sites and found many of them lacking in quality and content. He found that the best sites had improved editorially and were even nearing profitability, but only by not expensing editorial costs. Also according to the article, the sites with the weakest editorial content were able to aggressively expand because they had stronger financial resources.

• David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter and writer/producer of the popular TV series, "The Wire," criticized the concept of citizen journalism—claiming that unpaid bloggers who write as a hobby cannot replace trained, professional, seasoned journalists.

• Others criticize the formulation of the term "citizen journalism" to describe the concept, as the word "citizen" has a conterminous relation to the nation-state. The fact that many millions of people are considered stateless and often without citizenship (such as refugees or immigrants without papers) limits the concept to those recognized only by governments. Additionally the global nature of many participatory media initiatives, such as the Independent Media Center, makes talking of journalism in relation to a particular nation-state largely redundant as its production and dissemination do not recognize national boundaries. Some additional names given to the concept based on this analysis are grassroots media, people's media, or participatory media.

Who’s doing it?

• The list of citizen journalism sites is long and includes sites limited to nonprofessional reporting, such as NowPublic and CyberJournalist, and divisions of traditional media companies that feature citizen journalism, such as CNN’s I-Reporter.

• Some people use blogs, wikis, digital storytelling applications, photo- and video-sharing sites, and other online media as vehicles for citizen journalism efforts.