Week 8: Response

This study focuses a lot on the emergence of citizen journalism, and the “Community Journalism” special report focuses on how citizen media has increased tremendously in 2009. The tone I get from this State of the News Media report is that it has to be one or the other- that there’s either traditional journalism or citizen journalism. And because citizen journalism is rising, traditional/professional journalism must go into a dark closest and hide.

Yet there are some events that every day people cannot cover with a tweet or a blog. There are some events that we absolutely rely on the professional journalists to cover, and any reporting of those events in blogs are taking their information directly from the professionals, not the scene itself. For example, CNN streamed and broadcasted the entire Chilean Miner rescue. From start to finish, viewers could either tune into CNN on TV or pull up CNN.com to watch as every single miner rose from the earth.

No citizen journalist could deliver this news in this broad a scale. Even a small non-profit news site could provide this kind of in depth coverage and send this message all over the world. Citizen journalists and professional journalists can work together- it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Professional journalists can provide the in depth, world coverage that a single person cannot, but a single person who happens to catch an event on their cell phone can report their footage as well as give it to the professional journalist to augment their report.

“What most people don’t seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.” Rhett Butler says this to Scarlett when the War has just started in Gone with the Wind. It could be argued one way or the other that journalism as a civilization is either being wrecked or re-built. If you look at the situation in a positive way, it’s being re-built (or re-structured).

The people who can profit from the re-structuring are those who can flow with the tide. The stodgy newspaper owners who are digging their heels into the dirt and refusing to adapt will not profit from this journalistic renaissance. Professional journalists who have a knowledge of the the industry but apply the guerrilla-like tactics of citizen journalism as well as adopt all of the different emerging communication media as their publishing forum will thrive.

Tags: response