Everyone's a Journalist

Once upon a time journalism was an elite profession. You began your career as a cadet journalist writing stories on local sporting matches and getting the coffee, then climbed gradually to the top to be writing about the big stories. Now everything has changed. Citizen Journalism means members of the public being journalists - researching, collecting, writing and publishing news information.

As a journalism student in Australia, I have begun to question why I study this profession formally anymore. I feel like it gives me no more credibility to be a qualified journalist with a university degree than if I were to write an article as an ordinary citizen. If anything, an ordinary person is probably more qualified to provide information to society about a particular topic as they have some connection or involvement or background information or access to sources or resources that a formal journalist does not.  

It is mainly through new media that this change to citizen journalism has occured. There is of course the internet with journalistic-style blogs and independent news sites. Through these websites anyone can write and publish their own article without being a formal journalist. There is now the ability to podcast from your own computer in your bedroom a news story via the internet. Mobile phones allow us to capture first-hand video footage or photos of a newsworthy event as we see it happening.  ‘Youtube’ has enabled citizen journalism as anyone can post one of these videos and chances are that it will get more views than the official news footage on the television. Often a newspaper or television station purchases images or video from ordinary citizens who managed to capture an event faster than sending a qualified cameraman to the scene. Traditional media even allows ordinary people to become journalists to some extent by contributing to a news story after it has been written in the newspaper, broadcast on radio or television, by asking the public to write in online with their thoughts and comments.   

I think the rise of citizen journalism it is really to do with a change in the audience dynamic. We no longer want to be passive consumers of media, to be fed someone else’s opinion. Instead we want to be involved and active in the creation of the media that we read, watch or listen to. We can see this by how popular websites that demand audience participation, such as ‘Wikipedia’ and ‘Youtube’, are as opposed to traditional websites. It is this element of participation that we desire.

So will traditional journalism die and be replaced completely with citizen journalism? Will my 3 year university degree amount to absolutely nothing? I will just have to wait for the answers to these questions!

By Emma Losco