Citizen Journalism - Do it the Right Way

Today I will be talking about Citizen Journalism (CJ), the impacts of it and how we can all practise it in the right way. 

First, many may ask, what is CJ? 

It is the idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others. For example, you might write about a city council meeting on your blog or in an online forum. Or you could fact-check a newspaper article from the mainstream media and point out factual errors or bias on your blog. Or you might snap a digital photo of a newsworthy event happening in your town and post it online. Or you might videotape a similar event and post it on a site such as YouTube. All these are acts of journalism, and what is similar behind all these acts is that everyone, you and I, we can all participate and be involved in different forms of CJ.

However, there have been much controversy regarding CJ, as some professional journalists believe that only a trained journalist can understand the rigors and ethics involved in reporting the news. And conversely, there are many trained journalists who practice what might be considered citizen journalism by writing their own blogs or commentary online outside of the traditional journalism hierarchy. However, one of the main and new concepts behind citizen journalism is that mainstream media reporters and producers are not the exclusive center of knowledge on a subject — the audience knows more collectively than the reporter alone. Therefore with such distinct, digital users are able to obtain more truth, or maybe even more pseudo facts out of CJ. 

With great freedom comes great responsibility. We need to practise CJ  with responsibility in order to contribute to the betterment of society. I will be sharing about this article which shows how our freedom of acts can ruin the lives of many others who are the unsung heroes. These people are the ones who try their best to keep our Internet safe for laymen users like us. And here is the article. 

Sometimes we do not think much about what we post on the Internet, especially graphic images and videos which provide visuals that speak a thousand words. These are images that will be stuck to our minds and eventually cause a psychological toll on us. After reading this article, I sincerely hope everyone of us can practise acts of CJ in a moral way and we should be responsible on how we do it.