Citizen Journalism:

In Citizen Journalism text messages and e-mails from audiences have brought a valuable, yet additional aspect to journalism in that people are now able to film events on their phones and distribute it out to everyone. Everyone with a little of few means can have access to footage and can make their own footage.

Additionally, Citizen Journalism is the concept and idea of how members of the public are now playing “an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing distributing news and information,” whereas previously, in the ‘old media’ companies such as the BBC News were organised around four departments, one was whereby the newsgathering team organised the correspondents, crews in Britain and round other places in the world. Newsgathering supported two broadcast departments, that is, TV News and Radio News and finally there was a separate News Interactive department which ran the web and interactive services, but which did not have the full power to be able to call on content from their largely broadcast focused operations, examples of this form of journalism used to report world events include the BBC News broadcast of ‘Who Sank the Costa Concordia?’

Now Citizen Journalism is a specific form of citizen media as well as user generated content. New Media technology, such as social networking and media sharing websites, and the increasing use of mobile phones have made citizen journalism more accessible to people all over the world, who can often report breaking news much faster than traditional journalistic means. Notable examples of citizen journalism being used to report major world events include the London Riots where Malaysian Student Asyraf Hazik Rosli was mugged by rioters and the news report of an old lady who fends off robbers with her purse as they try to break into a Rolex store.

In the London Riot video, a citizen filmed a Malaysian student, Asyraf Hazik Rosli as he sat on the floor bleeding when he was approached by a group of youths. They were seen seeming to help him before rifling through his rucksack, stealing his wallet and his mobile phone. This became a viral video after someone had originally filmed this from their mobile phone before uploading it, this is what led to it appearing on Sky News first hours later and shortly after appeared on the BBC News where reporters continued to discuss the story in more detail carrying out an investigation into this. When the video first appeared on youtube from a persons mobile phone upload, comments rushed in, most of which commented saying, “I don’t know which is worse, the person robbing the student or the person videoing this and doing nothing to stop it or doing nothing from getting help.”

This was similar for the video of the old lady who fended off robbers with her purse as they attempted to break into a Rolex Store in Northampton. In this video which was a citizen journalist report the robbing was recorded via use of a mobile phone and was then disseminated across social networking sites also became a viral report after people came across it on sites such as ‘Facebook/Youtube’ and so on which again led to it appearing on BBC News hours later where journalists set out to investigate the full story and discuss this in more detail, as well as interviewing witnesses close by and the old lady who managed to fend off the robbers with her purse. However, the footage which they continued to use to showcase to the public in their own reports was in fact the original footage filmed by the citizen journalist exemplifying that without this footage there would not have been a story to broadcast.

Clearly, mobile phones have the potential to transform reporting and places the power of reporting in the hands of the public. However, the nature of citizen journalim has recieved some criticism from professional journalists for being too subjective, amateurish and haphazard in quality and coverage.