When I was in
journalism class, the subject of the affects of Citizen Journalism came
up. Citizen Journalism is everyday
people reporting news. One of the things
we discussed was whether it was a positive or negative thing.
If I recall properly (after all, it was a
LONG time ago) the discussion was pretty evenly split with pros and cons. With the recent government shutdown, I have
started thinking about this discussion again.
What brought it up was thinking about how unbalanced the opinions have
been about the whole mess, and how these opinions have been fed to readers.
As a society, we have been groomed through
the years to accept the news as fact. If
it was on the news, it was fact, as they had people who’s job was to check the
facts of a story. The only thing that
was doubted was the weather. At least
some things never change…
Now we live in the age of mass information. Sharing news with people is now as easy as
the click of a mouse button. However, where
is that “news” coming from? One of the
first things that my journalism instructor Rob Priewe made sure to press upon
us, was to check your sources. This is
something that is more important now for more people, than ever before.
In this current state of overabundance of
information, where anyone with an email address can start a blog, it is now up
to the consumers of this information to do the fact checking. However, most of them have not been informed
of this, or choose not to practice it. With
the advent of social media, the sharing of this misinformation becomes even
more widespread.
However, Citizen Journalism is not all
bad. For instance, often times a person
with a cell phone and access to social media or their blog, are on the scene of
an accident or other event, allowing them to share the news sooner than a
mainstream media outlet.
And then there are the travelogues. This is where I feel Citizen Journalism
really shines, especially since most of the travel journalism is in the form of
monthly publications. However, with Citizen Journalism here, you
have a wider variety of choices, whether you travel by motorcycle, do road
trips with your family in a car or RV, or you prefer hoofing it, you can find a
Citizen Journalist who caters to your taste.
Even though most travelogues are opinionated, as far as how the author
feels about the particular road, vehicle, restaurant that they are writing
about, the reader is expecting this.
In the end, Citizen Journalism isn’t a bad
thing. It allows everyone to have a
voice. However, as with anything in this
world, it is the responsibility of the person reading the story to make sure
that the author is actually knowledgeable, or just stating an opinion.
No comments:
Post a Comment