Quote: "Citizen journalism, also known as collaborative media, participatory journalism, democratic journalism, guerrilla journalism or street journalism, is based upon public citizens 'playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information.'"
How did Citizen Journalism come to exist?.
The Emergence of Citizen Journalism: This topic focuses on the historical context that led to the rise of citizen journalism. It looks at how technological advancements such as the Internet created new platforms for citizen journalists to share news and information.
Characteristics of Citizen Journalism: This topic looks at the fundamental principles of citizen journalism. It examines the unique features that distinguish it from traditional journalism, such as an emphasis on user-generated content, transparency, and open participation.
Origins of Public Journalism: This topic explores how public journalism influenced the development of citizen journalism. It looks at how public journalism sought to create a participatory democratic process by integrating citizen perspectives into news coverage.
Participatory Journalism: This topic looks at how the growth of the Internet has given rise to participatory journalism. It explores how this type of journalism encourages people to participate in the news process by contributing stories, sharing experiences, and providing local perspectives.
The Role of Social Media: This topic examines how social media has had a profound impact on the rise of citizen journalism. It looks at how social networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have provided new channels of communication for citizen journalists.
The Ethics of Citizen Journalism: This topic looks at the ethical dilemmas that arise in citizen journalism. It examines issues such as verification of information, privacy rights, and protecting sources.
The Impact of Citizen Journalism: This topic evaluates the impact of citizen journalism on mainstream media. It examines the ways in which citizen journalism has changed the media landscape and how it has affected traditional news organizations.
Citizen Journalism During Crisis: This topic looks at the role of citizen journalism during times of crisis. It focuses on how citizen journalists have played a crucial role in reporting breaking news, providing real-time updates, and capturing events as they unfold.
The Future of Citizen Journalism: This topic explores the potential future of citizen journalism. It examines the challenges and opportunities that lay ahead, and how citizen journalism may evolve and continue to shape the media landscape.
Personal Blogging: Personal blogging represents the earliest form of citizen journalism. With the emergence of Blogspot and WordPress in the early 2000s, individuals started to self-publish and express their views through their personal blogs. This type of citizen journalism allowed people to voice their opinions on the matters they cared about without any limitations.
Participatory Journalism: Participatory Journalism or Co-creation of news involved the collaboration of professional journalists and citizen journalists in the production of a story. This model involved working in unison, which helped in incorporating diverse viewpoints and perspectives. The popularity of social media and tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram helped to mobilize citizen journalists in contributing to different news events.
Citizen Journalism Model: This model of citizen journalism is based on the principle of having an active and well-informed public who are willing to report on events happening around them. This model gave rise to various citizen journalism websites and news organizations. Some famous examples are OhmyNews from Korea, Indymedia and Groundreport.
Crowdsourced Journalism: Crowdsourcing is a process of acquiring the knowledge, opinions, or information of a group of people with diverse viewpoints, experiences, and skillsets. Crowdsourced journalism collects information and news from masses using social media, email, and other online tools. It gives birth to different examples like Ushahidi: A Kenyan NGO that provided crisis mapping of incidents during the 2007 election violence.
Hyperlocal Journalism: Hyperlocal journalism includes reporting targeted to the needs and interests of a particular community or neighborhood. The focus is on providing news coverage that cannot be found in mainstream media. Many community newspapers, websites and other organisations focus on local news and events.
Quote: "Courtney C. Radsch defines citizen journalism 'as an alternative and activist form of news gathering and reporting that functions outside mainstream media institutions, often as a response to shortcomings in the professional journalistic field, that uses similar journalistic practices but is driven by different objectives and ideals and relies on alternative sources of legitimacy than traditional or mainstream journalism'."
Quote: "Jay Rosen offers a simpler definition: 'When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another.'"
Quote: "The underlying principle of citizen journalism is that ordinary people, not professional journalists, can be the main creators and distributors of news."
Quote: "Citizen journalism should not be confused with community journalism or civic journalism, both of which are practiced by professional journalists."
Quote: "New media technology, such as social networking and media-sharing websites, in addition to the increasing prevalence of cellular telephones, have made citizen journalism more accessible to people worldwide."
Quote: "Notable examples of citizen journalism reporting from major world events are, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the 2013 protests in Turkey, the Euromaidan events in Ukraine, and Syrian Civil War, the 2014 Ferguson unrest and the Black Lives Matter movement."
Quote: "Being that citizen journalism is yet to develop a conceptual framework and guiding principles, it can be heavily opinionated and subjective, making it more supplemental than primary in terms of forming public opinion."
Quote: "Critics of the phenomenon, including professional journalists and news organizations, claim that citizen journalism is unregulated, amateur, and haphazard in quality and coverage."
Quote: "Furthermore, citizen journalists, due to their lack of professional affiliation, are thought to lack resources as well as focus on how best to serve the public."