Within hours of news breaking about the worst school shooting in the history of the United States, hundreds of links to blogs, video clips and student-made tribute groups were searchable about the Va. Tech shootings. Hundreds of Facebook groups such as “Va. Tech, you are in our prayers” were created. Hundreds of tribute videos, compiled of photos, graphs and music, could be found on Youtube. Xanga, Livejournal and other online blog users updated their blogs about their feelings and own take on the entire situation. All these combined together, gave anyone who came across these sites, a different perspective to the story that the mainstream media could not do.
This is the power of citizen journalism. According to the report by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis entitled We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information, citizen journalism is defined as the act of citizens “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information” (http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php). In other words, the reader has now become the reporter.
Citizen journalism is the new form of communicating information to others. Readers are now hearing a voice from the community. Citizen journalism in a way has become a more intimate way of engaging into the news as the way of communicating news has become a bit more personal. Guillermo Franco, a professor of new media in Columbia, conducted an e-mail interview with five authors and journalists about the topic of citizen journalism and blogging. An excerpt from JD Lasica:
"People are tired of journalism as lecture; they want a conversation. Blogs present an opportunity for newspapers to reconnect with their readers and restore a sense of trust and community that was lost a generation ago as papers became more corporate and monolithic( http://www.poynter.org/dg.lts/id.31/aid.79157/column.htm)."
Let’s take a closer look. On the one hand, traditional journalism offers the facts, the statistics, and the stories, as told to the reporters. Citizen .journalism, in a sense, is from the reader’s point-of-view. While it is less structured and informal, the style is more conversational and casual, sometimes making it easier to read. People work together as a whole and collectively give accurate information. Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org), a public online encyclopedia, which allows anyone to write and post a news story and anyone to edit any story, is an example of how citizen journalism works.
Another aspect of citizen journalism stems from personal experience. Often times, citizen journalism entails hearing the news stories that are were missed by mainstream media. In his article As Blogs and Citizen journalism grow, where’s the News?, Rick Edmonds, a Media Business Analyst (http://poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=91391), wrote that since citizens are “Armed with cell phones or other digit-cams, [they] can be counted on to enrich coverage of events like last winter's tsunami, the London subway bombings and Hurricane Katrina, with still photos and streaming video.”
When all major networks around the nation aired the evening news the night of April 16, 2007, many aired the same shaky video footage of the campus and in the video, shots could be heard. The video was taken by a student on campus with his cell phone. This has become a different form of getting the news. That is not the only new form of citizen journalism. Students that were in the very classrooms that the shootings occurred from Virginia Tech would give a more accurate detail as to what happened than any other reporter for any news story. First-hand experiences being reported on their own terms would not only give a first-hand account of what happened but a definite accurate story in the eyes of one student.
The negative side, however, would be the different perspective of the story. The perspective would be greatly different from students who attended the school and students who were in the very classrooms that the shootings occurred. Both could reap drastically different opinions and perspectives. However, both stories would be accurate in the eyes of the writer, because it stemmed from their personal experience. Journalists are trained to try to be as objective as possible whereas citizens have the freedom to write as they please, vent their true feelings, and have a bias look on the situation. Christopher Hanson, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland (http://poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=79373) states that:
“There's no denying that the bloggers are a powerful force in the information world, but too many of them are either too self-absorbed to focus on keeping the public informed or too skewed by ideology to put factual accuracy front and center.”
As the rise of citizen journalism continues, a growing tension has begun to form between professional journalists and citizen journalists with issues such as payment and competition. In a live debate in the Organ Grinder (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2006/01/the_citizen_journalism_debate.html) section of the Guardian website (that was posted into a blog) a selected panel of experts and readers debated their views on the topic of citizen journalism. There were mixed feelings about the entire situation of payment. On the one hand, some such as panelist Bill Hagerty, editor of the British Journalism Review commented that when news was used, “you should pay for it, I’m amazed people are doing it [for free]. I think that will change” In the debate, the Guardian’s Simon Waldman responded (http://poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=95660):
“My greatest fear is that you are creating a culture of invasion of privacy for profit. I like the idea of people engaging with media; if people see something they should tell other people about it. But I don't like the idea that people can't walk down the street without having a camera phone shoved in their face."
Despite the growing tension between citizen journalists and professional journalists, all may not be counted as negative. In Dan Gillmor’s keynote speech on May 30, 2005 at the annual World Editors Forum in Seoul titled: “What a Professional and Citizen Journalists can Learn from Each other”(http://bayosphere.com/node/444), he stated:
“Some tension [between pro and citizen journalists] is inevitable, and not an entirely negative thing. Competition can make us all better at what we do. ... Something important is happening in the world of journalism: It's an evolution from the lecture model, to which we in mass media have become accustomed in the past century, to something closer to a conversation. ... If we lecture citizen reporters, treating them like children, they will ignore us.”
Given the nature of Citizen journalism, it does have its inaccuracies, as does all news. Opinion blogs often are found to be bias and reader may not be aware of this fact. Readers may be exposed to the wrong information because of a typo or inaccurate information given because of the casual nature of blogs and personal websites.
But let’s face it, we may bash on the inaccuracy of Citizen journalism but the fact of the matter is, most, if not all, is based on some sort of news, whether it be from online journalism or print journalism. Citizen journalism branches from those other forms and without tradiational journalism or even online journalism, citizen journalism would not be able to exist. As Edmonds states in his article, “Even as unperfected news forms, blogs and citizen journalism are exerting great influence.”
