Citizen journalism
[9] New media technology, such as social networking and media-sharing websites, in addition to the increasing prevalence of cellular telephones, have made citizen journalism more accessible to people worldwide.
[9] Critics of the phenomenon, including professional journalists and news organizations, claim that citizen journalism is unregulated, amateur, and haphazard in quality and coverage.
[9] A research team of citizen journalists created an OER library that contains video interviews to provide access to reliable sources.
[19] Some scholars have sought to extend the study of citizen journalism beyond the developed Western world, including Sylvia Moretzsohn,[20] Courtney C. Radsch,[21] and Clemencia Rodríguez.
[22] Radsch, for example, wrote that "Throughout the Arab world, citizen journalists have emerged as the vanguard of new social movements dedicated to promoting human rights and democratic values.
Citizen journalists are often portrayed as unreliable, biased and untrained – as opposed to professionals who have "recognition, paid work, unionized labour and behaviour that is often politically neutral and unaffiliated, at least in the claim if not in the actuality".
"As early as the 1920s, journalist and political commentator Walter Lippman and American philosopher John Dewey debated the role of journalism in democracy, including the extent that the public should participate in the news-gathering and production processes.
We are a better community newspaper for having thousands of readers who serve as the eyes and ears for the Voice, rather than having everything filtered through the views of a small group of reporters and editors.
"[35] According to Jay Rosen, citizen journalists are "the people formerly known as the audience," who "were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.
"[36] Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy with a home-movie camera, is sometimes presented as an ancestor to citizen journalists.
[41] A large amount of news footage from many people who experienced the tsunami was widely broadcast,[42] as well as a good deal of "on the scene" citizen reporting and blogger analysis that was subsequently picked up by the major media outlets worldwide.
[44] Social media platforms such as blogs, YouTube, and Twitter encourage and facilitate engagement with other citizens who participate in creating content through commenting, liking, linking, and sharing.
There has been a decline in the amateur news blogger due to social media platforms that are much easier to run and maintain, allowing individuals to easily share and create and content.
On Our Radar has undertaken in making the voices in Sierra Leone heard in regards to Ebola, revealing that it contained easy access to vital sources of information and opened more opportunities for questions and reports.
Through such evolution, citizen journalism has the capability to reach an audience that has not had the privilege of receiving higher education and still remain informed about what is surrounding them and their respective country.
In a blog from Syracuse University they mention [54]"From gun violence to mass deportations to sexual misconduct accusations leveled at powerful men, there is no shortage of reasons for the polarized American electorate to take to the streets in protest."
The public has had the resources to pursue this level of journalism from their surroundings and based on real life perspectives that lack censorship and influence from a higher entity.
[56] During the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests, fraudulent pictures encouraging people to pose as reporters and abuse freedom of press regulations to obstruct the police were widely circulated on social media with the aim to discredit citizen journalists.
An academic paper by Vincent Maher, the head of the New Media Lab at Rhodes University, outlined several weaknesses in the claims made by citizen journalists, in terms of the "three deadly E's", referring to ethics, economics, and epistemology.
[61] An analysis by language and linguistics professor, Patricia Bou-Franch, found that some citizen journalists resorted to abuse-sustaining discourses naturalizing violence against women.
[65] The author concludes that, "in fact, clicking through Backfence's pages feels like frontier land – remote, often lonely, zoned for people but not home to any.
David Simon, a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun and writer-producer of the television series The Wire, criticized the concept of citizen journalism, claiming that unpaid bloggers who write as a hobby cannot replace trained, professional, seasoned journalists.
"I am offended to think that anyone, anywhere believes American institutions as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives can be held to gathered facts by amateurs pursuing the task without compensation, training or, for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care to whom it is they are lying.
In the 1972 Branzburg v. Hayes case the Supreme Court of the United States invalidated the use of the First Amendment as a defense for reporters summoned to testify before a grand jury.
Citizen journalism is now one of the main contributors of mainstream news and consistently feeding in information that even traditional journalist can't grasp their hands on.
[69] Natalie Fenton discusses the role of citizen journalism within the digital age and has three characteristics associated with the topic: speed and space, multiplicity and poly-centrality, and interactivity and participation.
Citizen journalism has become a recent topic of discussion regarding its efficacy in documenting the downfall of popular cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
[72]Dan Gillmor, the former technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, founded a nonprofit, the Center for Citizen Media,[73] (2005–2009) to help promote it.
The association through its President (Maurice Ali) published studies and articles on citizen journalism, attended and spoken at UNESCO[75][76] and United Nations events such as a speech in General Assembly at the WSIS+10 meetings[77][78] that finally recognized internationally, "citizen journalists" as "journalists" with protections, by majority vote of member nations and announced in the final UN Resolution of WSIS+10 (sections 44/45 of that document).
[79] Elon Musk advocates for citizen journalism, urging X (formerly Twitter) users to share real-time text and video updates on unfolding events.
