” Citizen Journalism has played a major role in 21st-century political events” – Britannica
Form of journalism has been developed and evolve into something interesting. Following by technologies development, journalism shaped more specific nowadays.
You don’t need to be a journalist to report an event. Ordinary public able to reporting and carried it out online. This is now known as citizen journalism
We can see that social media is the biggest factor that changing nature in journalism. For example, newspapers are now putting their stories online on social media before making a breaking news on television.
This social media power in citizen journalist give them first opportunity to take pictures and document it before reporters are there.
This is leads me to what I believe the future of journalism to look like. Social media will became a vital base platform for news worthy stories to come out on. This social media making news spread easily and rapidly. However because anyone could be a citizen journalist, Facebook for example making a feature live video so people able to share what happened in the world. It looks very good but also has a big weaknesses. For example recently in New Zealand there were shootings/deaths being live streamed onto the internet for anyone to see. Facebook allowing people to live stream ‘real life’ deaths. This type of citizen journalism scares me, and because this citizen journalist want to spread a fear or a news about terror.
Other weaknesses facing citizen journalism, there is no one out there monitoring, regulating and most importantly, fact checking. People are essentially free to publish what they want on social media even when what they publish isn’t true. This is commonly lead us to fake news.
In this digital era, fake news is able to spread across the world just in a minutes and can reached millions of people who perceive it as fact.
So yes, in this digital era anyone around the world can be a journalist and social media afforded us with many opportunities as citizen journalist, but just because anyone can be a journalist doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone should.
In one aspect citizen journalism is a great thing if it is done in a positive way and especially they make sure it is a fact or not. On the other hand, if they aren’t professional journalists and at times they might be do not know about journalist ethics and censorship.
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