Citizen journalism lead to a disease

By: Tebele L.K


Picture : Google



In the modernised global world, people are affected by the rise of the technology one way or the other and there is nothing that you can do to avoid it but to abide with it.

Citizen journalism is an emerging form of journalism that is radically different from traditional journalism in philosophy and practice. The emergence of citizen journalism correlates with developments in digital technology, rapid global growth and use of the internet.

So as a professional journalist of this country I am already affected by citizen journalism in a manner that it will make my work easily and hard at the same time. The reason being is that, as journalist it’s a custom or let me say it’s a “norm” that you must go out from the diary meeting a gather and write a story about a particular issue or an event.

But with the emerge of citizen journalism it affects our career  because as upcoming global journalists, our work it’s going to be very simple whereby we will just write breaking stories and have access for videos online because everyone in the country have smart phones whereby they update via face book, twitter, Skype, blogs etc to give us a tip.

Citizen journalism allows participatory Journalism as an act of a citizen, or group of people, and playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information.

But also we need to bear in mind that citizen journalism also plays a part whereby it will destroy the fruitful tradition of journalism as a field because no one will no longer be interested in studying journalism or any communication course because their participatory level of disseminating and analyzing news and information will be right on their finger tips.

So as journalist I’d come back with the concerned comment that where as this “Citizen journalism” is still evolving, it will infect the professional journalism in a bad way because it’s like a disease whereby it will never be cured for safety measures.

It’s like a new cell phone that just had a niche and hit the shelves cell phone shops whereby customers will overspend or let me put it in a simple way, “customers will risk their money on it hoping that it will never give them problems with payment or service.

Also I’d say citizen journalism will discourage many future young journalists whereby they experience what we call “lazy journalism” where they will just sit down and send their stories to their editor without even meeting each other in the newsroom. Citizen journalism to me as blogger and journalism I say that it is good for the citizens of this country to disseminate information to the masses but to us as journalists we are in trouble because I see laziness upon our passion and dedication for professional journalism.  

I can’t argue with the fact that citizen journalism allows for citizen participatory but it will end the love of professional journalism period!