Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Grassroots Journalism: Pros and Cons

Grassroots, or citizen journalism has two prominent conflicting features from which most sentiment towards the idea is drawn from:

1. Grassroots journalism is generated from unpaid citizens, meaning citizens willing to contribute to a subject solely because they have an opinion and passion for it.

2. Because grassroots journalism is generated by citizens untrained in the ethics and practices of journalism, all information they produce is possibly biased and unreliable.

A local example is WBNG 12 actions news' "YouNews." YouNews allocates for both aspects of grassroots journalism: it provides a place where it is understood the news (photos and videos) are coming from untrained citizens. Visitors to the site also have the opportunity to submit their own story - which I assume would be edited and reviewed by professionals after submission; a good combination of citizen input and professional work.

This example shows a way to utilize citizen journalism without the dangers of unaccounted-for inaccuracies.

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