CITIZEN JOURNALISM

Journalists, as we all know, are the trained professionals who specialize in investigating and report events and issues to the public. 
In my opinion, Citizen Journalism is one form of Journalism that provides more opportunities to the public to report news, as every citizen could report information without professional training. Citizen Journalists can report information in different forms including in photos, texts, videos and as a report or podcast in online blogs. For example, it could capture any of the news events that send to news company or posted on blogs and other popular social networking such as facebook, twitter, myspace, youtube to provide a quicker, effective information relate to the news event.

The terror attack, 9/11 Bombings in 2001 is an example that citizen journalism effectively shows the fact in first time through uploads.

Sichuan earthquake in 2008 is another example where the first information come from twitter and then speared to different social networking with different form of text such as photos, text of the earthquake. This shows the important and effective of the citizen Journalist.

As the public usually are the audience of the News, their reports effectively represent the view of everyday people. This can give the power to people worldwide to report the information without the influence of the government or a specific interferer. Media has been defined as the fourth estate which the media sphere has individual power to press freely without influence of other estates. However, completely objective and factual reports are occasional in today’s society since most media organizations reports are either affected by bias, or have removed due to censorship and influences of authoritarians. Citizen Journalism, in this case, can improve the situation by presenting an uncensored, factual report that contributes to a healthier media environment.