This topic, citizen journalism, brings me back to the previous lessons when we discussed about consumer and prosumer.
So what is citizen journalism? And how it is different from traditional journalism we know?
Along with the convergence of media, citizen journalism is rising as an phenomenon. Simply, It is when private individuals, who are not trained, do essentially what professional reporters do – report information. the information can be represented in several forms (text, images, video, etc.) by several platforms (Youtube, Facebook, etc.).
There are billions of people are using social network. Everyday, every minute, there are billions of stories, news are posted. With only a cell phone, don’t have to be too expensive, anyone can report. Well, that means everybody can become a journalist. I mean, citizen journalist.
Citizen journalism is difference from traditional (professional) journalism. However, the only difference is the professionals are trained.
The main factor of the rise of citizen journalism, in my opinion, is the rise of social network. Nowadays, audiences are not only the consumers, who just get information via newspapers or radio/ tv shows but also are the producers, who produces news. They get information from each other. They spread it. They are called “prosumers”. As mentioned above, there are billions of news stories are posted on social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter. We may get information from Twitter before we see it on television. The latest earthquake in Nepal is an example. The information about the earthquake is widely spread on Twitter just a few minutes after it happened. Social network sites play a big role in changing the role of users. And that is a result of media convergence.
Reference:
- Rogers, “What is citizen journalism?”, About News.
ASTRONAUT 
Hey, great introduction to citizen journalism! You explain it very clearly and sound like you know what you’re talking about. My only suggestion would be to maybe use some pictures or a youtube video to better illustrate your examples, like the earthquake in Nepal you mentioned. There are heaps of videos of the citizen journalism surrounding the earthquake, and it would have really driven your final point home to have a video of it at the end.
All in all, great post! Keep up the good work!
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I really enjoyed your explanation of citizen journalism, as it is a very important topic within society and media today. I totally agree with you that social media is the biggest medium of citizen journalism. The Aurora shootings which were broadcasted through Reddit is a very big example of how and why it is important, and it’s a great piece of evidence to prove that citizen journalism is on the rise, and taking over traditional journalism and media. Thanks for the interesting read!
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This is a great explanation of citizen journalism and I like how you have connected it to social media and explained how social media contributes to it. Another thing to look at is how citizen journalism on social media has become instantaneous and why it is distributed so quickly, check out this article, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/10/03/how-twitters-hashtag-came-to-be/ on hash tags as it includes a great example of how citizen journalism works on social media.
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Fantastic job on introducing citizen journalism. You explained your knowledge of the concept in terms that all audiences can easily understand. One suggestion to improve your blog post would be to add more images or a video emphasising the Nepal Earthquake. By doing this the audience can visualise the impact it had and how social media played in distributing the news. This also allows for your argument to not be too text heavy and keeps the audience engaged!
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