Citizen Journalism Response

It’s interesting that citizen journalism stretches beyond the online world. I never really thought about it like that, but it does.  For example, people can use their phones to capture video and photos and submit those to news sources as a method of citizen journalism.

In class we had an interesting discussion about metajournalism and its impact on the journalism industry. And you can’t understand journalism without taking components of metajournalism into account. I think metajournalism has helped shape the journalism industry as whole.

For example, I don’t know how many times I’ve read an article from the NY Times (mostly in opinion pieces) where the journalist quotes someone that commented on a previous hard news piece. In this example, the journalist is crafting their piece based on other components of metajournalism. In this way, metajournalism does play a critical role in the formation of other journalistic piece.

During class we talked about whether someone like Betty Draper from 1963—who simply calls her neighbor to share commentary on the news—would be considered a citizen journalist.  In this case I don’t think she’s being a citizen journalist, but she is contributing to metajournalism as a whole, since she’s providing commentary. Of course, the missing piece here is that she’s simply providing her own insight without actually sharing the news story directly.

Citizen journalism is fascinating because it gives average citizens the power to share information, which can be both a good and bad thing.