Citizen journalism

Citizen journalism?

Is like street journalism. You don't have to be a journalist to let the world know what your thinking or reporting. It's basically using new technology to capture the evidence andostly on the internet adding it up, me.g. Blogs, YouTube, face-book, MySpace. Its human beings recording day to day bases e.g. news events. Then the public can respond to those posts on the internet and write their opinion on it.

From this stage, people with digital cameras can access to email. They email in pictures of events and stories. The advantages is for Newspapers and TV stations companies, when big events happen, such as the 911, much of the footage which the media have is from citizen journalists because they are first on the scene. Now big news companies ask for people to send in footage and photos of events or stories of anything they may have seen.

The advantages of citizen journalism are for people to have instant access to the incident. Without them you will not have any idea what the event was really like. Since TV crews would not go down their or journalist wouldn’t know that event was happening. So they can't prepare to be there at first sight. Therefore you need the public to be there already to get the real footage.

There are also disadvantages of citizen jounalist that people have to think about. The danger risk of taking the footage. Also citizen 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. E.g. Children being captured and not having their parent’s permission.

In the end citizen journalism will still remain as it is, becoming more and more useful to the media and for people to upload photos or videos instantly onto the internet. The public will have quick access to everything.