What role does citizen journalism play in today’s world?
Journalism is the collection of reports and analysis of recent events and happenings in the society. News media work independently and has the right to freedom of speech using various mediums like print media, television, radio, and the Internet. Social media has helped us to see active growth in Citizen Journalism and civic activism.
Even now the communities which were not aware of the perks of social media are now indulging in this sphere. It has given rise to many media startups that use the user-generated content through various platforms of social media including Facebook, Whatsapp, and Twitter. Citizens are always keeping an eye or becoming a watchdog monitoring several matters related to corporate and political issues.
There are different types of Journalism, a few of them are as follows:
What is Citizen Journalism?
Citizen Journalism can be defined differently by many people. It is the process of gathering the information, news and reporting it by the people who are not trained professional journalists and are called Citizen Journalists. The benefit here is that the information or facts are provided independently by the person that is reliable, accurate and relevant that is essential in the development of democracy. Thus, by using modern tools like the internet, mobile and other resources involving a common man can contribute to their community and society through media that help other people.
What is Social Journalism?
Social journalism is the process in which professional journalists, contributors, and readers play an active role in delivering and maintaining the reports related to the latest happenings in a particular area. It takes place on social platforms or open publishing platforms like Twitter, WordPress, etc. There are few examples of collaboration between the professional journalists and local citizens which include Forbes, Buzzfeed, Soapbox and Gawker, etc. The person involved in Social Journalism is called social media reporter responsible for forgiving informative content in media in the form of blogs, microblogs, website content, etc.
What is Participatory Journalism?
Participatory journalism is a kind of Citizen Journalism in which the people who are not even involved in journalism earlier like citizen journalists take active participation in giving the content related to the various happening and situations in particular areas. It is also called Street Journalism. This kind of journalism arises in a critical condition where common man tends to create a small Youtube video furnish the report so that everyone around gets to know about the prevailing situations like emergencies etc.
There are different media for citizen journalism. They are as follows:
- Audience Participation: It is the activity of replying to something published in other words if any news in the form of written online content, video, news stories, personal blogs, or any picture is posted using mobile phones or cameras, etc, the reply in the form of comments discussing that particular situation is termed as Audience participation.
- Independent News and Information Websites: There are various platforms that provide the news independently about specific events and circumstances. It includes Drudge reports and consumer reports etc.
- Participatory News websites: These are dedicated news websites involved in giving and publishing news online on their sites that consist of a Ground report, Now republic and many more.
- Collaborative and Contributory media sites: These include the media sites which get collaborated or make the partnership with the dedicated media platforms and provide them the content needed to be related to news, latest happenings in the form of a report and video contents. They are not indulged in publishing on their own but work at a different level and can be said the helping hand to the participatory news websites. These include Slashdot, News vine, etc.
Personal Broadcasting sites: These are maintained personally by the individual or group of individuals contributions to news reports, contents and other valuable information which are sometimes however missed by the media operating in that particular area. They also tend to brief the specific content or work to give the local people to respond to some situations. These include Ken Radio and many more personal broadcasting channels.
