‘Citizen Journalism’ is a concept that can be defined as the idea that every citizen takes an active role in the news reporting. It is embodied in the idea of everybody’s participating in news area, which means that everybody plays a proactive role in the process of news gathering, reporting, analysis and dissemination.
Sometimes called ‘grassroots journalism’ and citizen journalist believe that they provides a higher standard to news organizations and provide news from different angles and views.
The rise of citizen journalism is due to the Internet, which transforms common people from a passive audience of traditional media into active participants in creating news and comments. Thus, the citizen journalism is often related with the new forms of media and includes everything from passionate letters to the editor and comments on blogs and news websites, to bloggers scooping stories exposing doctored or omitted facts from mainstream media reports.
However, not all the countries and areas in the world can achieve the goals of citizen journalism. Take China as an example. We all know that there is a strict government control in china in order to achieve the harmony of the society. In other words, the Chinese government has long tried to keep a tight rein on traditional and new media to prevent any challenges to its political authority. This has often entailed, watchdog groups say, strict media controls using monitoring systems, shutting down publications or websites, and jailing of dissident journalists and blogger/activists. Take my own experience as an example, if people talk about some sensitive words or issues by using the Chinese chatting tool ‘QQ’, the words will blocked by the servicer.
In addition, most citizen journalists are from ordinary citizens, and most of them are non-professional journalists, and thus, the news credibility of citizen journalist is far from the professionals. Unlike traditional media, as most professional journalists have a high quality in education, citizen reporters are from different variety of classes, education levels and occupations. And this leads the reports from citizen journalist are lack to depth and accuracy.
Noted that due to technologies development, definition of journalists has attached new meaning. Citizens are able to become "independence journalist" online. In other words, Internet users can post what they want to say and publish information/news. I do agree with your views that many factors influence the trend of citizen journalism, such as country's freedom of speech, political status and the public's common culture/ethics.
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