In a digital world today, where we now have such a range of different ways to communicate with our family, friends, colleagues, communities and the general public, opportunities have been created in which they have empowered people to share stories with the world. It is this which has very much generated a transformation to the field of journalism, where the internet has become the agent in delivering communication on news and events without the need of proper mainstream journalism. As a result we now have citizen journalism, where the cost to publish news online comes at no cost, therefore providing ourselves with the opportunity to produce coverage on a range of news topics and events that may have been ignored or not given the depth of coverage priror by mainstream journalism.
Citizen journalism, as pointed out by Small World News director, Brian Conley (2012), is the future of journalism. Why this is so, is because citizen journalism provides an important service in the wider media and public sphere (Bruns 2009). This service is based on that;
– it builds on diverse participant bases,
– it adds broad multi-perspective analysis and commentary on news events,
– builds on committed interested communities,
– it is able to engage in a more ongoing, longitudinal fashion with key themes in the news and,
– that it employs a gatewatching model. (Bruns 2009)
However on top of this we must remember that ‘not all citizen journalism is engaged in such high-stakes, global impact impacts, but that it also serves a purpose in providing a more in depth and insightful coverage of news areas that have been in the past traditionally neglected by mainstream media’ (Bruns 2009). This point is very much the basis of Brian Conley’s TED Talk (2012) ‘Citizen Journalism is Reshaping the World’.
In ‘Citizen Journalism is Reshaping the World’, Conley (2012), expresses this point emphatically, that the future of media is local rather than mobile. He believes this because through his experiences in dealing with struggling societies and people around the world, social media has given a voice to the people who were once voiceless, meaning that now today they have the platform to share their and also the stories of others to the world (Conley 2012). While in traditional media these stories would have not been given any recognition or coverage, today the voiceless now have this voice they have desired and it is because of the very fact that social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube, have created citizen journalism.
Conley (2012) believes that “everybody has a story and somebody wants to to listen to it”, and it is very clear with how social media has empowered people to share these stories, that citizen journalism is in fact the future of journalism. After watching Conley’s (2012) TED Talk, it was very hard to disagree with the statements he made. With the tools we are now given in this digital world, I believe it is clear that we can all be the producers of news content that can be far more critical than the traditional reporting of mainstream journalism. Citizen journalism is in fact, reshaping the world.
References
Bruns, A 2009, ‘New Blogs and Citizen Journalism: New Directions for E-Journalism’, viewed 17 September, https://moodle.uowplatform.edu.au/pluginfile.php/245673/mod_resource/content/1/Bruns%2C%20A.%20-%20News%20Blogs%20and%20Citizen%20Journalism.pdf
Conley, B 2012, Citizen Journalism is Reshaping the World: Brian Conley at TEDxMidAtlantic, Tedx Talks, 17 December, viewed 19 September 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY-l9UQpf0Y>.
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