Voice of the People: Is Citizen Journalism Revolutionizing News?

Journalism is a term we are very familiar with. It basically is the art of informing people about important and current events.It dates back to ancient times , with the evolution of the society journalism has also evolved. Starting from informing people with “DHOL” and royal message from  shifting to print media then to broadcast and then now is the time of digital media and in this world of digital media something that has highlighted itself in the society is “Citizen Journalism” . What exactly is citizen journalism? According to me it is the next step towards right to speech and expression as well as the right to information. It is where people who are not professional journalists collect, analyse and distribute information.

Citizen journalism has been holding the power of changing the society’s perspective towards any event or information and it has rapidly changed the media. Now if we go deeper into the fact that there has to be a day when it starts any revolution, any evolution?? The answer would be in 2000,when Oh Yeon-ho opened an online newspaper called OhmyNews where he signified citizens as  reporters and asked them to share news. It turned out to be an online revolution people seemed to like a lot by 2007, OhmyNews the citizen journalist increased from 727 reporters in South Korea to 50,000 reporting from 100 countries. After this citizen’s journalism has only gone up in the graph.Apart from this we can not let go of the event when Abraham Zaprudera accidentally recorded the assassination of John F Kenndy and was called the pioneer of citizen journalism. When I first read about this incident  I found it a little amusing but it did open the eyes of people to see the opaque  side of journalism.

Now if we move forward and talk about  the psychology of citizen journalism. It basically consists of the idea of grabbing the opportunities. Use the white space that was there in the media for years -for example some incident took place it would take time for the media channels and newspaper reporters to reach the spot that time frame is white space which people used and reported the event with just one click on their phone and with time now citizen journalism is a boosting career option.

Citizen journalism is also popular as  collaborative media, participatory journalism, democratic journalism, guerilla journalism, or street journalism and all these describe people being the  active and important  part in media .

We can easily imagine the pros and cons of citizen journalism as democratic participation , real time reporting , diverse perspectives and  cost effectiveness  can be  considered as pros. On the other hand Lack of Training, Misinformation, No Editorial Oversight, Risk to Personal Safety and Credibility Issues are major concerns. But one thing that is clear is that citizen journalism is a radical competition to professional institutions and journalism. Mark Glaser who is a specialist in productivity measurement and development and social development as well as citizen perception of government said that “people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others”.
The key words being here are people without professional journalism training which means that it somehow breaks the stereotypical ways and values of journalism and coincidentally it meets the requirements of the current digital and fast world , which again  affects the legacy media directly.
The citizen journalism came into existence because the people who were called as audience in the former system of media consumption who were supposed to grab the information they were served but that particular habit  changed in the new scenario the audience are not only the receiving end of the system but now they are more vocal and more able and less predictable now.

There is no doubt that this form has also  degraded the quality and authenticity of the news as the main purpose is to reach a higher number of people. It has somehow managed to create a very strong audience both educated and uneducated. The latter are those who are not blessed with media literacy falls for the click bait,wrong information and misinformation which many times leads to create serious social issues for example religious riots.
Citizen journalism has thoroughly established itself  globally for example – In the Arab countries citizen journalism is the voice of people on social as well as political issues. We can also take example 9/11 where citizens were the major contributors of visuals and information.
If we talk about where citizen journalism stands in India we can take the examples of NIRBHAYA CASE and the very recent ABHAYA CASE where social media brought light to the ground reality and people with the help of their phone reached everyone in the country and spoke for justice.

The concept of citizen journalism is more than familiar now and from what I see this digital revolution won’t be falling in graphs in the future. As now it is not only a career option for people but many take it as a strong social tool to bring out voices which may be not heard by the show called Mainstream Media.