The emergence of social networks shows that new sources of
information are available on the internet. People can access internet to create
blogs, websites and profiles to discuss and update anything about the world.
For example, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and blogging are
tools that can publish articles or news. These social networking sites are the
platforms to express opinions and thought of the citizen journalists to public.
The advancement of technology has allowed anyone with a camera mobile phone and
a laptop to be a citizen journalist.
As all of us know that everyone can access to internet to get
the information and news immediately by scrolling their smartphone, switching
on their laptop or checking their mobile devices rather than watching the
television, listening to radio and reading newspaper.
What is Citizen Journalist
According to Goode (2009), citizen journalism is related to
the internet. Internet is used by citizens not only to receive information but
also is a way to transmit information (Mecano, 2015). According to Mecano
(2015), citizen journalists are non-professional who collect, write, edit and
distribute the information to public. Citizen journalist is when ordinary
people do basically what professional reporters do – report information which is in the forms of text, video, pictures
and audio (What Is Citizen Journalism,2015). The information that published by citizen journalism can be found on
their blogs. However, citizen journalism does not always stay in online. We can
find the news that written by citizen journalism in the print media which
provides some columns for citizen journalism which is called soapbox features (Goode, 2009).
Who is the professional journalism?
Professional journalists are being employed in a press
company and being trained as a journalist (CitizenJournalism, 2012). Journalists are considered as a job with its rules and
ethics. Professional journalists have the knowledge and they are trained in
writing news in the right format. For example journalists will write the news
based on inverted pyramid structure which is the most important information on
top of story and the least important at the bottom (The Newswriting Format, 2015). Besides that, one-sentence
lead of no more than 40 to 45 words that summarizes the most newsworthy and
important aspect of the story (The Newswriting Format, 2015).
People should be wary
of citizen journalism
A citizen journalist can actually captures news worthy events
as it is happening and shares it with the rest of the world. The scope of the
citizen journalist is not limited to breaking news events. However, citizen
journalist is also someone who can simply comments, reposts or tags pictures on
particular websites. Hence, sometimes citizen journalist reports inaccurate
information (What Is Citizen Journalism,
2015).
Citizen journalists have no formal training in reporting and
writing the news such as editing news in an inverted pyramid like what
professional journalists do. This may cause the credibility of news difficult
to verify and lack of objectivity. For example, rumors about the deaths of
famous celebrities are often made until spreading false information via online
can cause negative impact to ownself and themselves. Citizen reporters do not
have any ethics of being a professional reporter. For example, what exactly do
a reporter define a news? What kind of news is considered important and has the
new value? Besides that, citizen journalists are not trained on the libel law.
They do not have the knowledge about what they can or cannot say in a news
story. Citizen journalists tend to be bias. Everything about what he or she
thinks will straight away publish on internet.
According to Stverak (2010), thousands of traditional
journalists had been fired and the readers, viewer and listeners had fled. As
all of us know that, today is the age of technologies, traditional or
professional journalism should follow up the trend and culture of sharing in
internet. If not, more long times, professional journalists will be replaced by
citizen journalists one day.
What do you think about citizen journalism? Do you
think it is less valuable than professional journalism? What information
sources do you trust most?
References
Citizen
journalism. (2012). Retrieved
from http://www.freebase.com/m/02hpjd.
Goode,
L. (2009). Social news, citizen journalism and democracy. New Media and Society, 11(8), 1287-1305.
Mecano, T. (2015). Citizen journalism. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/8478508/Citizen_Journalism.
Stverak. (2010). The pros and pros of citizen
journalism. Retrieved from http://franklincenterhq.org/1352/the-pros-and-pros-of-citizen-journalism/.
The newswriting format. (2015). Retrieved from http://journalism.about.com/od/citizenjournalism/a/whatiscitizen.htm.
What
is citizen journalism. (2015).
Retrieved from http://journalism.about.com/od/citizenjournalism/a/whatiscitizen.htm.
