SPEED OF CHANGE 3… Citizen Journalism

Citizen Journalism is one of the fastest growing trends recognized globally. This is as a result of digitization which has greatly increased access to information and made it a lot easier to share this information through different channels of communication. Like every other change this has impacted shareholders (both the public and media houses) positively and negatively. In the digital age where communicating news has become so much easier; it has become so challenging to distinguish between amateur shots taken by eyewitnesses and posted on the internet against professional broadcast on a TV channel. Bloggers have in several instances also reported on facts/news way before the reporters receive these facts.

Media houses have in most cases become hostage to these new, "immediate" technologies through citizen journalism such as citizen reportage, blogging and vlogging. And many working in the genre praise the developments for adding a richer dimension to current affairs and everyone seems to agree that the genre will never be the same again. "Phone cameras and internet video must threaten broadcasters who think TV viewers will move away from them (and on to the web), but the collective arena is a hive of creativity," says Molly Dineen. "It should add to what traditional reporters are doing and not take away."

The independence of citizen journalism has popularized it so much because the public appreciate the rawness of the footages/information published in this genre. The popularity of the mediums of communication such as whatsapp and internet has also made access no longer a challenge. The independence due to lack of verification and moderation is also the disadvantage since it’s hard to validate facts as reported in different versions in blogs and footages. Therefore wrong information is easily passed from one viewer/reader to another.

The flip side of this is that reporters and media houses have taken advantage of this genre and used ‘crowd sourcing’ to supplement their broadcasts/publications to improve on the end product. When they crowd source news in this manner then it saves them time and money that would have been spent finding it. This however doesn’t come without its risks, such as the risk of provenance which validates the source and legitimacy of this information and the second risk is the risk of unemployment for those who do this job.

There is a sense that objective journalism is not the same as citizen reportage, but there are two divergent views with this analogy. First there are hostile places where journalists haven't been able to go and therefore citizen journalism comes in handy, and second there is an extraordinary resource on social networks for news, even though caution has to be taken to verify this information. The ideal mix would be to blend professional journalism with citizen journalism to make perfect footages which are raw and up-close but still professional.