CITIZEN JOURNALISM
Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information. Itshould not be confused with community journalism or civic journalism, which are practiced by professional journalists, or collaborative journalism, which is practiced by professional and non-professional journalists working together. Citizen journalism is a specific form of citizen media as well as user generated content.
Examples of citizen journalism are :
Canada: http://mybreakingnews.cp24.com/
United States: http://www.thirdreport.com/
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES
The advantages to citizen journalism are numerous. The first is that for media organisations, they allow them to have instant access to on the spot footage. It means that media outlets can carry pictures which they simply would never get if it were not for citizen journalism.
The main disadvantage is that there is a big danger risk to the members of the public taking this footage. The second danger is that these people have no media training and no knowledge of any laws which they may be infringing either during the capture of the footage or the release of it to the media – such as if children have been captured in the footage without their parents’ consent.
Like journalists, citizen journalists have to adhere to the ethics of online journalism. Here’s an interesting site on ethic of online journalism.
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/wiki/ethics/
CITIZEN JOURNALISM VS TRADITIONAL JOURNALISM
What about SINGAPORE ?
Yes, we do have a local citizen journalism site. It none other than STOMP.
STOMP also known as Straits Times Online Mobile Print is a Singapore-based web portal by Singapore Press Holdings. Its Singapore Seen section is a citizen journalism platform for Singaporeans to contribute news tip-offs, photos and videos.
Citizen journalist can contribute what they think is news worthy by uploading a news report followed by an image or video. Viewers can then voice out their thoughts by posting comments on that particular article. Most of the matters are trivial matters and are usually for entertaining purposes.
It is a great way to pass time and also entertaining.
These are some of the interesting articles reported by the netizens.
nikchng 