With tools like camera phones or Eye-Fi loaded cameras, applications like Twitter/Twitpic or Qik and platforms from traditional news outlets such as CNN’s iReport how effective has citizen journalism become? Can citizen journalism replace the beat reporter at a traditional outlet? How have these tools, applications and platforms changed how news is shared, and more importantly how news is initially reported?
The news cycle has transitioned from disseminating information every 24 hours, to dozens of times in those 24 hours seven-days-a-week, to the now. Instantaneously news is shared as it happens. Inexpensive tools as well as some that are practically free have altered the manner in which people find out about breaking news. The most recent example of a passerby being present to share a dramatic fleeting moment was Janis Krums’ photo of passengers on the wings of a sinking plane in the Hudson River. Krums sent the image from his phone to Twitpic and the resulting image not only crashed the servers of the online photo site Twitpic, but also virally across the Internet and onto newspaper fronts across the country the following day. Other events have been documented as they occur such as the Gaza invasion by Israeli forces, terrorist attacks in Mumbai, earthquakes in California as well as China and there are several others.
Is the initial flood of raw information enough to inform a collective community? How has the persistent growth of Twitter users altered the news cycle? Have traditional news outlets been able to effectively engage various circles of social groups on Twitter to help drive and direct news gathering or sharing? How reliable can instantaneous dispatches of 140 characters or less be in the realm of facts and quest for truth? There are now news networks being created solely on Twitter. How will these seemingly radical changes of reporting also alter the business models of traditional and even non-traditional news outlets?
These are some of the questions I propose to try and seek answers to. Feel free to add more to the pile or share thoughts on how you learn about breaking news or become informed about stories.
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I don't think the question is can citizen journalism replace professionals but rather what their existence does to the journalism landscape. For what it's worth here's something I wrote on the topic
ReplyDeletehttp://adrienne.typepad.com/adrienne_russell/2009/01/the-future-of-journalism.html