Citizen Journalism

Citizen Journalism is essentially amateur journalism. It is characterized by average people performing acts of journalism on their own without being paid. One does not have to be a professional journalist to share their point of view on things, or to document an event as they see it. Citizen journalism is an informal channel of spreading news and opinions, as opposed to the traditional channels of mass media, such as TV news broadcasts or official reports by paid staff journalists. Many times, traditional media such as Fox and CNN embrace citizen journalism because it actually helps them. They can get different perspectives of an event from the pictures and videos of everyday people. The news station gets free videos and pictures, and the people who submit them essentially get to be heard; it’s a win-win.

I remember one specific example of this over the summer. One day, a large passenger plane crash-landed in the middle of the Hudson River and somehow stayed intact and afloat. Over several hours, the people inside the plane were all rescued one by one. I watched part of the event unfold, and news stations were actually specifically asking people to send in videos or pictures of the event if they had any.

This is one instance in which citizen journalists clearly trump official paid journalists – spontaneous events. For the most part, it is very hard and rare for a professional journalist to capture a random unexpected moment. Many significant spontaneous events in recent times were captured by amateur journalists in a way a professional journalist could only dream of. One example is 9/11, and another is the death of Neda – those cameras just happened to be at the right place at the right time to record the respective events. Recording something like that in that way is a very rare thing for a professional journalist, who is usually trying to focus on the bigger picture.

Another aspect of citizen journalism is that although there is potential for fraud, it does a good job of keeping everyone honest, more so than traditional media does. As discussed in class, the ability of people to become producers as well as users of media has in many ways marginalized the effect of the economic estate. This helps keep media, or citizen journalism, rather, free of outside influence and free from pressure to make money. This helps keep the people reporting independent. It keeps them free of their boss’ influence, so they are free to present their own point of view rather than the point of view of the person who signs their paycheck. Citizen journalism is a force of great progress; the only downside is that people are many times motivated by their selfish desire to be heard, which is not really a big deal.