Week Two: Citizen Journalism

There are three elements which are “critical to the rise of citizen journalism” (Flew, 2008).  Citizen Journalism is a democratic form of journalism where anyone, regardless of their status or credentials, has the ability to share and publish news in the way that they perceive it.  One of the driving factors of Citizen Journalism websites is that they allow users to publish news in almost any way that they see fit.  Due to this, the users and the public effectively choose the type of news they wish to view and share.

The first of the three elements is ‘open publishing’.  Open publishing, as the name suggests, is a very open form of sharing news and content which allows readers to filter through content with much more ease.  In fact, the readers have the ability to change and edit the news if they have more information or more opinions on whatever is published.  Even though there are many websites already that share some of the principles of Open Publishing, like a non-heirarchal system and public participation, only websites dedicated to Open Publishing have the ability to filter out problematic content as there are so many users contributing at any time.

Second, ‘collaborative editing’ is another element that is critical for Citizen Journalism.  The rise of the internet has made this a possibility more than ever before.  The biggest, and most well known example of this is the website Wikipedia.  When groups, as well as individual contributors work together to share information and knowledge, they are all accessing the same website, but uploading their own information.  Therefore, allowing users to add to each others information creates a more varied source of knowledge and information.  In principle, this is more or less the same as Citizen Journalism.  A varied group of individual contributors, all working together, editing each others information in order to make it as relevant as possible.  The comment system available on almost all Citizen Journalism websites is perhaps the most useful.  Comments allow readers to finish, add on to, and discuss in more depth anything that the original publisher started.

Finally, ‘distributed content’ is the third of Terry Flew’s elements.  This is the idea that “content should not be consumed exclusively in the service in which it is created” (Wilson, 2007).  It is about creating content, and distributing it in as many ways as possible.  Many Citizen Journalism websites provide RSS feeds, links to blogs and so forth.  With tools like these, posts and forms of news can be accessed by readers in a variety of ways that suits them best.  This allows the information to be much more accessible.  This way, readers don’t have to go to the website every day just to check for new information.  Instead, they can choose to have the most relevant information sent to them, either directly to their email inbox, or through applications like Google Reader.

References:

Flew, T. 2008. New Media: An Introduction. 3rd ed. South Melbourne: Oxford UP.

Wilson, F. 2007. Distributed Media and Comments. http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2007/08/distributed-med.html (accessed 5th May, 2009)