Citizen journalism: Can it be an alternative?

Mass media have always been in forefront to inform, educate, and entertain people. Traditional media such as newspapers, radio and television have (and still does), remained a major source of news and information.

Traditionally, media contents are produced by professional journalists and distributed to larger audience. However, eroding trust in the news media and widespread public disillusionment with politics and civic affairs led to rise of citizen journalism in the late 1990s.

Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing and disseminating news and information. In a report: ‘We media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information’, authors Bowman and Willis says: “The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.”

Citizen media has bloomed with the advent of technological tools and systems that facilitate production and distribution. Of these technologies, none has advanced citizen media more than the Internet. With the advent of Internet and its rapid development since 1990s, citizen media has responded to traditional mass media's neglect of public interest and partisan portrayal of news and world events.

There are many forms of citizen-produced media including blogs, v-blogs, podcasts, digital storytelling, and more and may be distributed via television, radio, internet, email, and many other forms. Many organizations and institutions exist to facilitate the production and distribution of media content by citizens.

The media content produced by citizens may be as factual, satirical, neutral or biased as any other form of media but their objectivity is what often critiques questioned about.

References:

Bowman, S and Willis, C 2003, We media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information, the Media Centre at the American Press Institute, Reston Virginia.

Wikipedia, Citizen Journalism, viewed 19 February 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism#cite_note-wemedia-2.

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