Citizen Journalism
Citizen journalism, also known as collaborative media, participatory journalism, democratic journalism, guerrilla journalism or street journalism, it is based upon public citizens “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing, and disseminating news and information.
Citizen journalism “as an alternative and activist form of news gathering and reporting that functions outside mainstream media institutions, often as a response to shortcomings in the professional journalistic field, that uses similar journalistic practices but is driven by different objectives and ideals and relies on alternative sources of legitimacy than traditional or mainstream journalism”.
The role of Citizen Journalism in addressing human rights issues; where ordinary citizen can participate in collecting, publishing and analysing news.
Citizen journalism into the following types:
- Audience participation (such as user comments attached to news stories, personal blogs, photographs or video footage captured from personal mobile cameras, or local news written by residents of a community)
- Independent news and information Websites.
- Full-fledged participatory news sites.
- Collaborative and contributory media sites.
- Personal broadcasting sites.
- Open source news platforms.
The classical model has four main characteristics:
- Journalists’ role of informing citizens.
- Citizens are assumed to be informed if they regularly attend to the news they are supplied with
- More informed citizens are more likely to participate
- The more informed citizens participate, the more democratic a state is more likely to be.
In recent years citizen journalists played an important role in reporting breaking news, often as it was happening. For example, bloggers and others joined forces to show the world the real-time consequences of major disasters, such as the tsunami that devastated Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in 2004.
Citizen journalists also provided embedded coverage of international political uprisings such as the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, and important medical stories such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Akshitha Beljies, 22MCP001
The concept of public journalism has evolved into a movement called “citizen journalism,” where members of the community contribute to the news via blogs and online interactive forums. Several tele- vision news channels such as CNN and MSNBC use citizens to report the news, particularly in times of tragedies such as floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. It is also referred to as participatory journalism or “user-generated content,” where members of the community actively contribute to the news by reporting or writing reports.