Citizen Media

More and more people access information every day as new channels open up for dissemination. Central to peripheral dissemination has largely been replaced by peripheral to peripheral. People have the opportunity to distribute their ideas, values, and opinions more today than ever before. Consumers make their voices heard by what online advertisements they click on, what websites they visit, and what products they buy and sell on eBay and Amazon. Anyone with something to share can make their voice heard through email distribution lists, blogs, podcasts, open source like Wikipedia, personal websites, discussion boards, and even chatrooms. Technology, particularly the Internet, is changing the way people live, and it is changing the way journalists work.

Sue Ellen Christian acknowledges the shift in the communications profession: “As citizen journalists begin to create their own news in the vacuum left by mainstream media, experts say journalism students need to prepare for a reality in which members of the press are not the sole purveyors of news” (Christian, 2006, p. 33). The Internet is empowering individuals to report on what is happening in their world. One Web site allows people to report on other people doing things they shouldn’t. If someone parks in two spaces, a photograph of the car (complete with license plates) caught in the act may show up on this Web site the very next day. Thomas Friedman affirmed the fact that citizen media is on the rise when he said, “The center of thinking within journalism is not completely within the newsroom anymore. The center of thinking about public life—which is essentially what good journalism is—is moving out to hundreds of thousands of people. The Web makes it possible for citizens to think in public together” (Friedman, 2005, p. 55).

Could citizen media eliminate traditional journalism altogether? A prime example of citizen media is OhMyNews. Time Magazine reported: “Kim Hye Won doesn’t look like a journalist… She looks like a 45-year-old Korean housewife, which is what she is. More and more journalists are starting to look more and more like her. Kim is a citizen reporter for a South Korean website called OhMyNews… OhMyNews is written by a floating staff of 47,000 amateur journalists all over the country. The site gets 1 million to 1.5 million page views a day” (Grossman, 2006, p. 57). The million people who look at the Web site every day likely appreciate being able to read articles written by people with opinions—people, at least, who aren’t afraid to show them in their writing. However, opinion saturated writing can inhibit others from forming their own opinions, and accuracy comes into question when so-called “amateurs” are at work, as Sue Ellen Christian pointed out in her article (Christian, 2006, p. 33). Albert Meijer in First Monday said, “The growing importance of the Internet adds a new dimension to these new forms of accountability” (Meijer, 2005, para. 3). Though people are drawn to the frank openness of people publishing online for personal reasons, a many people still recognize the need for trained journalists to report as fairly as possible, to gather information that others may find tedious or difficult to gather (GRAMA requests, legal documents), and to check and double check the facts. Journalists must not, though, feel too secure with standard practices for newsgathering and dissemination.

News organizations should instead utilize the very technologies that thousands of citizen reporters are using. Hundreds of newspapers have built up their Web sites, adding video feed, slide shows, discussion boards, and even staffed blogs. Some newspapers have even found the need to add blogging into their code of ethics (Tallent. 2006, p. 27). Roger Fidler of the Missouri School of Journalism stated: "The reality is that for the future, there won't be any single product that will capture a large audience" (Frye, 2006, p. 15). Thus news organizations need to diversify to keep up with advancing technology, using numerous innovations to appeal to various segments of their market.

References

Christian, Sue Ellen (2006). Experts: students must prepare for future of citizen journalism. Quill, 94(6), 33-35.

Friedman, Thomas L. (2005). The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Frye, Michele Holtkamp (2006). The Ever-Evolving newpaper. Quill 94(9), 14-18.

Grossman, Lev, et al (2006, December 25). Time Person of the Year: You. Time Magazine, 40-79.

Meijer, Albert Jacob (2005). ‘Public eyes’: direct accountability in an information age. Retrieved January 23, 2007, from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_4/meijer/index.html

Tallent, Becky (2006). Newspaper works to include blogging in code of ethics. Quill, 94(9), 27.