Citizen Journalism

Citizen journalism, that is the keyword, and as every keyword research we should first know, and explain who, or what we will be talking about. I could by myself at least figure out what citizen journalism was. A kind of journalism created by and for regular people. There is a lot more than that. The most interesting thing I found was the eleven layers, or steps to citizen journalism, written in a article by Steve Outing.
1 - The first step would be “opening to the public comment”. That would mean for companies and networks to let their audience comment on articles on news on-line and on the TV.

2 – The second step is called “the citizen add-on reporter”. In this second step networks use small articles, footage or advice from regular people who have something to add to a journalist’s story.

3 – Number three is called “open-source reporting”. In this step the journalist will get involved with one of his/her readers so they can collaborate into a story together, off course this reader has to be knowledgeable about that particular subject.

4 – The fourth step is the blogging phenomenon. Although a lot of people go on-line to look at “real” news and all, the majorities of hits are always of bloggers, because people want to read what other people like them have say. It is becoming more and more popular to have blogs or websites, where people write what they think, comment on news, or give the new themselves. That how the Huffington post works

5 – The “newsroom citizen ‘transparency’ blogs” works in this specific way. They are bloggers from ordinary people, but they give other ordinary people the power to be a part of it, is citizen journalism double timed. They are becoming more and more popular, some people don’t want to simply read the news, and they want to be a part of writing it, commenting and sharing it.

6 – This sixth step is one of the greater one for citizen journalism on-line, called “stand alone”, this website is usually created for a specific society, and it is written by the people in this city. The posts can be about anything that happened in the city. Subjects can be about soccer-games, the violence going on, the new playground, the new hospital that is being built, it can go very wide. That is how mymissourian.com works. But, before being posted all the text is edited by someone and then added to the website, and this makes us go one step further.

7 – Number seven would be identical to number six if it wasn’t for one difference, this “stand-alone” is unedited, that means that whatever the writers submit to posting, will be posted just the way they wrote it. This is a great responsibility to citizen journalists, because something like this has the potential to go horribly bad, and that could end up with all the credibility some citizens have acquired with time.

8 – Number eight is a combination of steps six and seven. But this time they go even further, an added a printed edition. It actually surprised me a lot that someone would be able to print a newspaper, with citizen stories. That just proves that this is a growing industry. Can we call it industry? After reading number eight a bunch of questions ran through my mind, now I wonder if this citizen journalists, are simply common people, or if writing is actually their job and this is for their free time? Do they make money out of citizen journalism? Is it easy to become one? So just because I am being posted in a newspaper or web-site I could be consider a journalist? These are questions that I hope were answered in class, it is unfortunate I couldn’t be there to talk my mouth out again. Hahaha.

9 – Number nine is a mixture, where professionals and citizen journalists work side by side. In this combination they work together, some of the citizen stories and pictures get posted, and just some of them get paid. But then again, wouldn’t people who have their stories and pictures posted be now professionals, or at least free-lancers?

10 – Number ten is like number nine, but they would work even more together. While in number nine, is a professional company, that takes some of citizen journalism, this would be a true mix of those and they would be truly side by side, and one story above the other.

11- For last is the “wiki-journalism”, where the citizens take even more parts in the whole thing, now they are not only the writers but also the editors. It is a very complex thing to understand. Even while reading I was confused how will we end up differentiating professionals from citizens?

This is all really interesting and I will be even more excited trying to look for good thing to write about and see if I can be posted somewhere. Who knows?