I have two different opinions about how citizen journalism has made journalism both better AND worse.
It's better in the sense that it gives everyday citizens a voice. You don't have to be a professional journalist to express your opinion. It also gives people the opportunity to "check" the media and call them out.
However it can be bad because since anybody can be a citizen journalist it may take away some of the credibility of good journalism...citizen journalism reaches the public uncensored and unedited so you can't trust everything you read on Facebook, Twitter, or blogs...I feel like citizen journalism is merely just the average joes opinion.
What do you think?
Thursday, October 21, 2010
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2 comments:
Like you said, it has its ups and downs.
It is difficult enough to establish what exactly a journalist is. Since there is no exam like other professions to distinguish experience and knowledge, it is hard to say whether these joe shmoes are journalists.
Sharon Grigsby of the Dallas Morning News said something interesting about this.
"when I am ill, I don't want to go to just anyone with a stethoscope. Or have my car repaired by anyone who happens to own a wrench."
Just because someone has a computer and can type a blog or whatnot, can they be considered a journalist? I guess a lot of it depends on the content.
Overall, I think citizen journalism is good for journalism. Think about the entire on campus shooting a couple weeks ago. How different would reporting have been without citizen journalism? We would have known a lot less at times when we would have wanted a lot more.
I agree in that citizen journalism can be a powerful tool that reinforces the main elements or goals of journalism, if the new that it reports are fact based and trustworthy. And in that way, there can be a kind of competition between the two factions of journalism. But citizen journalism,in my view, is more opinion based than fact based. But all in all, i believe that citizen journalism has had a positive effect on journalism in the sense that it broadened the base of information available to the public. It also represents a kind of watchdog on the national news media.
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