Media
What is meant by the term ‘citizen journalist’?
As technology has improved over the years, there has been a rise in the number and scale of incidents where ‘citizen journalists’ are the reason that the news broke into the mainstream media this has become more and more common.
Citizen journalism is when private individuals do what professional reporters do and report information. This information can take many forms, from a podcast editorial to a report about a city council meeting on a blog. It can include text, pictures, audio and video.
The other main feature of citizen journalism is that it's usually found online. Due to the emergence of the Internet with blogs, podcasts, streaming video and other Web-related innovations such as social networking - is what has made citizen journalism possible.
The Internet has given average people the ability to transmit information globally. That was a power once reserved for only the very largest media corporations and news agencies such as, News Corp.
In this day and age, millions of people have constant access to filming capabilities through their mobiles, and footage can be uploaded and rapidly distributed on the internet. The power to make and break news has moved beyond the traditional news institutions. This is Citizen Journalism.
What was one of the first examples of news being generated by ‘ordinary people’?
We first felt the effects of the new technologies way back in 1991. Video cameras had become more common and more people could afford them, unfortunately for four Los Angeles police officers who having caught Rodney King, an African-American, after a high speed chase, the officers surrounded him, tasered him and beat him with clubs. The event was filmed by an onlooker from his apartment window. The home-video footage made prime-time news and became an international media sensation. This was one of the first real time examples of citizen journalism.
This was one of the first examples of the news being generated by ‘ordinary people,’ now know known as ‘citizen journalists’, ‘grassroots journalists’, or even ‘accidental journalists’.
List some of the formats for participation that are now offered by news organizations
News organizations in this day and age allow audiences to access and read the news on the move due to revolutionary software’s such as the iPhone and due to the introduction of 3G networks, which allow the audience and readers of the news to read the news on the go without having to buy a newspaper. The main advantages of the new formats that are offered by news organizations is that the news is free whereas newspapers are not.
Most news organisations include formats for participation: message boards, chat rooms, Q&A, polls, have your says, and blogs with comments enabled. Social media sites are also built around UGC as seen in the four biggest social networking sites: Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. People also turn to UGC sites to access news: Wikipedia news, Google news and YouTube score highly in terms of where people go to get their news.
Other formats provided by news organizations consist of news by social networking where news institutions such as Sky and BBC have set up accounts which allow readers and audiences to follow the news over Facebook and twitter which again are free.
What is one of the main differences between professionally shot footage and that taken first-hand (UGC)?
One of the main differences between professionally shot footage and that taken first-hand is that the quality of the footage taken first hand often tends to be very low quality where the image is grainy whereas professionally shot footage tends to be of a very high quality. However, as the technology over the years has developed, cameras on mobile phones in this day and age are as good as or better than normal cameras.
We now expect passers-by, witnesses, or even victims, to whip out their camera phones and record events, an instinct almost as powerful as that to save their own or others’ lives. Perhaps the news now seems old-fashioned and somehow staged if it lacks the raw, grainy low-quality footage provided by citizen journalists.
What is a gatekeeper?
Gatekeeping is a media term used to describe the filtering of stars and coverage through television and print. This derives from the gate in a camera through which the film has to pass before it is broadcast to the targeted audience. A message has to pass through many gates (filters) before it reaches its audience. This means that a selection of media topics is chosen to be presented to different audiences through different forms of media. A gatekeeper is a person who controls access to something.
What is one of the primary concerns held by journalists over the rise of UGC?
Journalists fear for their jobs as now everyone is producing content, this is because It is likely that in future there will be fewer and fewer permanent trained staff at news organisations, leaving a smaller core staff who will manage and process UGC from citizen journalists, sometimes known as ‘crowd sourcing.’ Some believe that the mediators and moderators might eventually disappear too, leaving a world where the media is, finally, unmediated. This does raise concerns however.
If there will be fewer jobs for trained journalists, will there also be less profit for the big institutions? This seems unlikely. Although how to ‘monetarise’ UGC – how to make money for both the generator and the host of the content – is still being debated, bigger institutions have been buying up social networking sites for the last few years. Rather than launch their own challenge, they simply buy the site. Flickr is now owned by Yahoo!, YouTube was bought by Google, Microsoft invested in Facebook, and News Corp., owned by Murdoch, bought MySpace.
