Week 15: EOTO (Citizen Journalism)

Citizen journalism is growing around the world. With different easy to use websites and a typing device at our fingertips, any one is able to write. Britannica defines citizen journalism as "journalism that is conducted by people who are no professional journalists but who disseminate information using Web Sites, blogs, and social media". Citizen are able to immediately report about natural disasters, wrecks, and accidents as well as use real time footage that they record themselves! Pretty cool how just about anyone can do this and share with the world.

The term and practice of  "Citizen Journalism" comes from South Korea. Online entrepreneur, Oh Yeon-ho, voiced that "every citizen is a reporter". Unhappy with the Korean Press, he and three other colleagues started an online newspaper in 2000. The online newspaper, called "OhmyNews", used volunteers to write content for the paper that was posted on the cite. When the company started they only had 727 citizen reporters in one country, but in 2007 that had over 50,000 citizen reporters all reporting from over 100 countries.

While some may believe that citizen journalism is great, many do not agree with it. Some believe that citizen journalism threatens real journalist and has a high risk of being fake. Additionally, people believe that real journalists have better critical thinking skills. Personally, I do not agree with this. I believe that citizen journalism allows news to get our faster, is interesting and what other citizens want to hear, and allows one to write as first hand experience and often in the moment.

Citizen journalism is most prevalent on social media. Breaking news often appears on social media before anywhere else! Especially on sites such as Facebook and twitter. A larger audience is able to be reached through online sites like these. This type of journalism allows for all different age groups and types of people to access news in a whole different easy way.

Power Point:





https://www.britannica.com/topic/citizen-journalism
https://artplusmarketing.com/is-citizen-journalism-killing-professional-journalism-b60531ee1d0c