Citizen Journalist..Formerly Known As The Audience

The term citizen journalist is pretty literal; just normal, everyday citizens contributing to collecting media and making it available to the masses.
But it's more than just taking a picture of an event with your Iphone and posting a story about it online. Granted, that is a part of citizen journalism, it's just not the whole.

There are actual types of citizen journalists, which I found to be very interesting because at first when thinking about this term, I took it just as we were talking about it in class. Very literal and thinking just about people pulling out their picture phones and showing everyone what they've discovered or what happened to them on the way to work.

The website Poynter Online actually lists the different types of citizen journalists. From commenting on editorials and newspaper articles to the new hot commodity of blogging, everyone has the opportunity to become a citizen journalist.

In the Poynter Online article, number four, The Citizen Bloghouse I found to be the most interesting. A main company contains a blog and can choose to allow citizens to contribute to the information they've posted, possibly even start a blog of their own addressing that specific topic..and get paid for it.
I mean, we were talking about people taking on social networking jobs, I think it's even crazier to think that people are getting paid now to just sit in front of a computer and blog about a company's ideas/topics.

Addressing the same article, I feel like citizen journalism might take away from the actual honest opinion of the average reporter. There's opportunities now for people to give their advice and input into a reporter's article before it's even published. It makes me think that originality is going to be thrown out the window. And say good-bye to media reporters doing their assignments on their own.
But then again, we are Gen Y, and we do prefer to work in groups and feel that sense of community, so I suppose it might not be such a bad thing.



Citizen journalism has a lot of benefits, one of them being spreading information from overseas. This article discusses about violence in Kenya in December of 2007; a woman by the name of Okollah started blogging about what exactly was going on. What the media wouldn't talk about. Her blog escalated into people using Google Maps to pinpoint exactly where the violence was taking place.
It seems like without citizen journalism being formed, people might have never really known about this.
It really makes me wonder what other information we're missing out on.
...but it also makes me really excited to think about what media we'll be receiving soon.

I found this awesome video via YouTube covering citizen journalism...check it out.