Citizen journalism (also known as "public", "participatory", "democratic"[1], "guerrilla"[2] or "street journalism"[3]) is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal 2003 report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information.[4] Authors Bowman and Willis say: "The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires."
Citizen journalism should not be confused with community journalism If it covers wider topics, community concentrates on their effect on local readers. Community newspapers, often but not always published weekly, also tend to cover subjects larger news media do not, such as students on the honor roll at the local high school, school sports, crimes such as vandalism, zoning issues and other details of community or civic journalism The civic journalism movement is, according to professor David K. Perry of the University of Alabama, an attempt to abandon the notion that journalists and their audiences are spectators in political and social processes. In its place, the civic journalism movement seeks to treat readers and community members as participants. With a small but, which are practiced by professional journalists, or collaborative journalism Collaborative journalism is a mode of journalism where multiple reporters or news organizations, without affiliation to a common parent organization, report on and contribute news items to a news story together. It is practiced by both professional and amateur reporters, which is practiced by professional and non-professional journalists working together. Citizen journalism is a specific form of citizen media The term citizen media refers to forms of content produced by private citizens who are otherwise not professional journalists. Citizen journalism, participatory media and democratic media are related principles as well as user generated content User-generated content , also known as consumer-generated media (CGM) or user-created content (UCC), refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users.
Mark Glaser, a freelance journalist A freelancer, freelance worker, or freelance is a self-employed person who pursues a profession without a long-term commitment to any particular employer. The term was first used by Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe to describe a "medieval mercenary warrior" or "free-lance". It changed to a figurative noun around the 1860s and was who frequently writes on new media New media is a term meant to encompass the emergence of digital, computerized, or networked information and communication technologies in the later part of the 20th century. Most technologies described as "new media" are digital, often having characteristics of being manipulated, networkable, dense, compressible, interactive and issues, said in 2006:[5]
The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others. For example, you might write about a city council meeting on your blog or in an online forum. Or you could fact-check a newspaper article from the mainstream media and point out factual errors or bias on your blog. Or you might snap a digital photo of a newsworthy event happening in your town and post it online. Or you might videotape a similar event and post it on a site such as YouTube YouTube is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos. Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in February 2005. The name and logo of the company are an allusion to the cathode ray tube, a display device used since the early days of electronic television.[citation needed].
In What is Participatory Journalism?,[6] J. D. Lasica classifies media for citizen journalism into the following types:
- Audience participation (such as user comments attached to news stories, personal blogs A blog is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a, photos or video footage captured from personal mobile cameras A digital camera is a camera that takes video or still photographs, or both, digitally by recording images via an electronic image sensor, or local news written by residents of a community)
- Independent news and information Websites (Consumer Reports Consumer Reports is an American magazine published monthly by Consumers Union. It publishes reviews and comparisons of consumer products and services based on reporting and results from its in-house testing laboratory. It also publishes cleaning and general buying guides. It has approximately 7.3 million subscribers and an annual testing budget of, the Drudge Report The Drudge Report is a conservative news aggregation website. Run by Matt Drudge with the help of Andrew Breitbart, the site consists mainly of links to stories from the United States and international mainstream media about politics, entertainment, and current events as well as links to many columnists)
- Full-fledged participatory news sites (NowPublic NowPublic is a user-generated social news website. The company is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and was founded by Michael Tippett, Leonard Brody and Michael Meyers in 2005. The company was acquired by citizen journalism site Examiner.com on Sept. 2, 2009 . Examiner.com is a division of Clarity Digital Group, LLC, wholly owned by, Third Report, OhmyNews OhmyNews is a South Korean online newspaper website with the motto "Every Citizen is a Reporter". It was founded by Oh Yeon Ho on February 22, 2000, DigitalJournal.com Digital Journal started as a technology and gadget magazine in 1998 and evolved into a global citizen journalist news hub in 2006. DigitalJournal.com has seen significant growth since 2006 from word-of-mouth, GroundReport GroundReport is a global citizen journalism platform that enables anyone to submit news reports and videos for publication to an international audience. A digital news network, GroundReport is syndicated to Google News, The Huffington Post and The New York Times. With a mission to 'democratize the media,' GroundReport's 7,000 international)
- Collaborative and contributory media sites (Slashdot Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section attached to it. Slashdot was founded in 1997 as a, Kuro5hin Kuro5hin (pronounced "corrosion", i.e. /kɵˈroʊʒən/) is a collaborative discussion website. Articles are created and submitted by Kuro5hin's users and submitted to queue for evaluation. Site members can vote for or against publishing an article and, once the article has reached a certain number of votes, it is then published to the, Newsvine Newsvine is a community-powered, collaborative journalism news website, owned by msnbc.com, which draws content from its users and syndicated content from mainstream sources such as The Associated Press. Users can write articles, seed links to external content, and discuss news items submitted by both users and professional journalists)
- Other kinds of "thin media." (mailing lists, email newsletters)
- Personal broadcasting sites (video broadcast sites such as KenRadio).
New media theorist Terry Flew states that there are 3 elements "critical to the rise of citizen journalism and citizen media": open publishing, collaborative editing and distributed content.[7] From this perspective, Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 16 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales itself is the largest and most successful citizen journalism project, with news often breaking through Wikipedia editors, and stories being maintained as new facts emerge.[8]
Contents |
History
The idea that average citizens can engage in the act of journalism has a long history in the United States. The modern citizen journalist movement emerged after journalists themselves began to question the predictability of their coverage of such events as the 1988 U.S. presidential election The United States election of 1988 featured an open primary for both major parties. Ronald Reagan, the incumbent President, was vacating the position after serving the maximum two terms allowed by the Twenty-second Amendment. Reagan's Vice President, George H. W. Bush, won the Republican nomination, while the Democrats nominated Michael Dukakis,. Those journalists became part of the public, or civic, journalism movement, a countermeasure against the eroding trust in the news media and widespread public disillusionment with politics and civic affairs.[9][10][11]
Initially, discussions of public journalism focused on promoting journalism that was "for the people" by changing the way professional reporters did their work. According to Leonard Witt, however, early public journalism efforts were, "often part of 'special projects' that were expensive, time-consuming and episodic. Too often these projects dealt with an issue and moved on. Professional journalists Journalism also includes opinion and analysis. Besides covering powerful organizations and institutions such as government and business, journalists also cover cultural areas, such as sports, arts and entertainment. Features include profiles of interesting and noteworthy people were driving the discussion. They would say, "Let's do a story on welfare-to-work (or the environment, or traffic problems, or the economy)," and then they would recruit a cross-section of citizens and chronicle their points of view. Since not all reporters and editors bought into this form of public journalism, and some outright opposed it, reaching out to the people from the newsroom was never an easy task." By 2003 2003 was a common year that started on a Wednesday, according to the Gregorian calendar. It was the 2003rd year of the Common Era or the Anno Domini designation; the 3rd year of the 3rd millennium and of the 21st century; and the 4th of the 2000s decade, in fact, the movement seemed to be petering out, with the Pew Center for Civic Journalism closing its doors.
With today’s technology the citizen journalist movement has found new life as the average person can capture news and distribute it globally. As Yochai Benkler Yochai Benkler is Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and the author of The Wealth of Networks and the paper Coase's Penguin has noted, “the capacity to make meaning – to encode and decode humanly meaningful statements – and the capacity to communicate one’s meaning around the world, are held by, or readily available to, at least many hundreds of millions of users around the globe.”[12] Professor Mary-Rose Papandrea, a constitutional law professor at Boston College, notes in her article, Citizen Journalism and the Reporter’s Privilege, that:[13]
[i]n many ways, the definition of journalist has now come full circle. When the First Amendment was adopted, “freedom of the press” referred quite literally to the freedom to publish using a printing press, rather than the freedom of organized entities engaged in the publishing business. The printers of 1775 did not exclusively publish newspapers; instead, in order to survive financially they dedicated most of their efforts printing materials for paying clients. The newspapers and pamphlets of the American Revolutionary era were predominantly partisan and became even more so through the turn of the century. They engaged in little newsgathering and instead were predominantly vehicles for opinion.
The passage of the term “journalism” into common usage in the 1830s occurred at roughly the same time that newspapers, using highspeed rotary steam presses, began mass circulation throughout the eastern United States. Using the printing press, newspapers could distribute exact copies to large numbers of readers at a low incremental cost. In addition, the rapidly increasing demand for advertising for brand- name products fueled the creation of publications subsidized in large part by advertising revenue. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the concept of the “press” morphed into a description of individuals and companies engaged in an often competitive commercial media enterprise.
Birth of Blogs and the Indymedia Movement
In 1999 1999 was a common year that started on a Friday (link will display full calendar). In the Gregorian calendar, it was the 1999th year of the Common Era, or of Anno Domini; the 999th year of the 2nd millennium; and the 99th year of the 20th century. It was also the 10th and last year of the 1990's, activists in Seattle created a response to the WTO The World Trade Organization is an organization that intends to supervise and liberalize international trade. The organization officially commenced on January 1, 1995 under the Marrakech Agreement, replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which commenced in 1948. The organization deals with regulation of trade between meeting being held there. These activists understood the only way they could get into the corporate media "Corporate media" is a term which refers to a system of media production, distribution, ownership, and funding which is dominated by corporations, and is governed by the capitalist imperatives of maximizing profits for the investors, stockholders, and advertisers was by blocking the streets. And then, the scant 60 seconds of coverage would show them being carted off by the police, but without any context to explain why they were protesting. They knew they had to create an alternative media model. Since then, the Indymedia movement has experienced exponential growth, and IMCs have been created in over 200 cities all over the world.
NowPublic Co-founder Michael TippettSimultaneously, journalism that was "by the people" began to flourish, enabled in part by emerging internet and networking technologies, such as weblogs A blog is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a, chat rooms The term chat room, or chatroom, is primarily used by mass media to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing. The term can thus mean any technology ranging from real-time online chat over instant messaging and online forums to fully immersive graphical social environments, message boards An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site. It originated as the modern equivalent of a traditional bulletin board, and a technological evolution of the dialup bulletin board system. From a technological standpoint, forums or boards are web applications managing user-generated content, wikis Wikis may exist to serve a specific purpose, and in such cases, users use their editorial rights to remove material that is considered "off topic." Such is the case of the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia. In contrast, open purpose wikis accept content without firm rules as to how the content should be organized and mobile computing Mobile internet access is generally slower than direct cable connections, using technologies such as GPRS and EDGE, and more recently 3G networks. These networks are usually available within range of commercial cell phone towers. Higher speed wireless LANs are inexpensive, but have very limited range. A relatively new development is the use of convergent polls, allowing editorials and opinions to be submitted and voted on. Overtime, the poll converges on the most broadly accepted editorials and opinions. In South Korea, OhmyNews OhmyNews is a South Korean online newspaper website with the motto "Every Citizen is a Reporter". It was founded by Oh Yeon Ho on February 22, 2000 became popular and commercially successful with the motto, "Every Citizen is a Reporter." Founded by Oh Yeon-ho on February 22, 2000, it has a staff of some 40-plus traditional reporters and editors who write about 20% of its content, with the rest coming from other freelance contributors who are mostly ordinary citizens. OhmyNews now has an estimated 50,000 contributors, and has been credited with transforming South Korea's conservative political environment.
In 2001, ThemeParkInsider.com became the first online publication to win a major journalism award for a feature that was reported and written entirely by readers, earning an Online Journalism Award from the Online News Association The Online News Association , founded in 1999, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization made up of more than 1,600 members. Its mission: Inspiring innovation and excellence among digital journalists to better serve the public and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is a journalism school and one of Columbia's graduate and professional schools. It offers three degree programs: Master of Science in journalism , Master of Arts in journalism and a Ph.D. in communications. The school, founded with a bequest from Joseph Pulitzer, is located on Columbia for its "Accident Watch" section, where readers tracked injury accidents at theme parks and shared accident prevention tips.
In February 2003, iBrattleboro.com was launched in Brattleboro, Vermont, becoming one of the first citizen-written news sites in the United States.
In 2004, a citizen journalism website called AssociatedContent.com was launched. The "People's Media Company", as they claim to be, was the first company to offer monetary compensation for their users that publish quality content in the form of articles, videos and audio clips. More recently, Allvoices launched in July 2008. Its CEO, Amra Tareen, is a Muslim American and former venture capitalist who created the site after having done charity work in her native Pakistan. While there she noted there was no central hub on the Internet where anyone, anywhere could witness and then instantly report from their perspective news as it happened. Allvoices uses a combination of technology and community to vet stories for authenticity and popularity. The site takes contributions from around the world via any Internet-connected device and its contributors frequently break stories before the mainstream media. Allvoices was also the first citizen journalism site to measure the credibility of contributed reports and their authors, providing readers with a gauge launched in March 2009 for assessing the accuracy of news accounts.
During the 2004 U.S. presidential election The United States presidential election of 2004 was the United States' 55th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 2, 2004. Republican Party candidate and incumbent President George W. Bush defeated Democratic Party candidate John Kerry, the then-junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. Foreign policy was the dominant, both the Democratic and Republican parties issued press credentials to citizen bloggers covering the convention, marking a new level of influence and credibility for nontraditional journalists. Some bloggers also began watchdogging the work of conventional journalists, monitoring their work for biases and inaccuracy.
A recent trend in citizen journalism has been the emergence of what blogger Jeff Jarvis Jeff Jarvis is an American journalist. He is the former television critic for TV Guide and People magazine, creator of Entertainment Weekly, Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News, and a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner terms hyperlocal journalism In journalism, local news refers to news coverage of events in a local context which would not normally be of interest to those of other localities, or otherwise be of national or international scope, as online news sites invite contributions from local residents of their subscription areas, who often report on topics that conventional newspapers tend to ignore.[14] "We are the traditional journalism model turned upside down," explains Mary Lou Fulton, the publisher of the Northwest Voice in Bakersfield, California. "Instead of being the gatekeeper, telling people that what's important to them 'isn't news,' we're just opening up the gates and letting people come on in. We are a better community newspaper for having thousands of readers who serve as the eyes and ears for the Voice, rather than having everything filtered through the views of a small group of reporters and editors."[15]
|
Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:30:31 GMT+00:00
for Representatives of National ... PanARMENIAN.Net Net - Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) organized a workshop on Citizen Journalism for Representatives of National Minorities on July 23-25, ...
320px x 530px | 42.20kB
[source page]
technical focus and so their users can be found online But with a CJ site the users may not be online a lot PerthNorg hopes to address this by getting a good viral campaign going soon Community Top stories on PerthNorg get around 10 17 votes Topics are broad and range from football I presume Aussie Rules a strange form of rugby that Australians seem to love
Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:17:55 PDT
The UpTake kicks off this new series with Chicago's intrepid Citizen Kate. She's been hot on the campaign trail since Obama announced his ... espanol.video.yahoo.com.
