Citizen Journalism

The effect citizen journalism has on qualified journalists

Citizen journalism in essence is the covering or reporting of breaking news and news in general by the public. You practically don’t have to have a journalism qualification to do that.

This kind of journalism has been happening before but dominated the industry when social media emerged. We witnessed in the early 2000s when the towers building was bombed September 11 in America.  People, who were there when this tragic incident took place, took to the internet to inform others even journalists, who were far from the scene. Since then, it has been a norm with the use of twitter; normal citizens can now inform the public about events that are happening.

This however will affect me as a professional journalist or reporter. Firstly, what separates me from the citizen journalist is that I have a constructive, objective way or format of informing masses or news consumers. On the other hand, the latter writes to tell a story regardless of how subjective and unprofessional it is.  They just want their voices to be heard.

So ,what happens when I report and a citizen journalist report is confusion and contradictory because readers will fail to understand why the latter hasn’t used or considered ethics.  Citizen journalists are likely to go to the extent of publishing sensitive information because they don’t have understanding of what should and shouldn’t be published. Since readers are attracted to raw information they might find the qualified journalist as someone who holds information back .

We as journalists again have not only our colleagues to compete with but unqualified journalists too. Journalist are no longer the people who get information first hand. This affects the immediacy because when the eye witness sends a story to a journalist , they are likely to have published it on social network first. This discredits the journalists.

There is nothing wrong with public informing people but it shouldn’t be to discredits journalists.