Week 7 Response to Content

The Positives and Negatives of Citizen Journalism.

Citizen journalism is the reporting of news to the public without being employed to do so and is said to flourish under governments of ‘soft authority’ (indymedia.org, 2009). Is citizen journalism a good or bad phenomenon to come out of increased communication technologies such as blogging and camera phones?

A case of positive citizen journalism occurred during the London Bombings on the 7^th of July 2005. On this day, news teams carried a huge weight with intense pressure to get the news out to the public quickly and accurately as possible. When the bombings occurred many citizen journalists sent images and emails containing information to the news rooms, this becoming an integral part of the investigations and broadcasting for the crisis. The new technology at the time, the phone camera, allowed images to be sent into these news rooms allowing instant editing enabling news to reach the public quicker. The quantity and quality of the London bombing events could not have been reported so successfully without the help of citizen journalism (Sambrook, 2005).

The negative aspects of citizen journalism lay mainly in the content published. Journalists have certain ethics and editing rules to abide by before being able to publish their work. Citizen journalists however, don’t have these gatekeeping constraints. Using the example of the 2005 London bombings, journalists that received information from the citizens still had their news reports edited and refined with a fine tooth comb making sure the material published was accurate. However, citizen journalists are able to post what they feel is newsworthy and accurate onto website, such as a blog, without the accuracy being assessed (Lewis, S, C, Kaufhold, K & Larsorsa, D, L, 2010)

Citizen Journalism does have its positives and negatives. These journalists can both hinder and help the reporting of news to target publics. However there are no current measures in places to stop citizen journalists publishing their view on a news story, it is up to the readers of the news to filter through the copious news items published by all journalists and decide for themselves what they want to believe.
    

References

·         ‘Citizen journalism flourishes in dark corners’, Independent Media Centre Australia, August, 2009 viewed 10/09/2011 http://indymedia.org.au/2009/08/05/citizen-journalism-flourishes-in-dark-corners

·         Lewis, s, C, Kaufhold, K & Larsorsa, D, L, ‘Thinking about citizen journalism, the philosophical and practical challenges of user-generated  content for community newspapers’, 3^rd March 2010, viewed 10/09/2011 http://sethlewis.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/915813980.pdf

Sambrook, R, ‘Citizen Journalism and the BBC’, Nieman reports 2011, 2005, viewed 10/09/2011  http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100542