so, due to citizen journalism, just about anyone can get into the media of the web and make a difference out there with the shattering news the world contains. and how does one go about becoming such a journalist? by joining an already established site, sure, or by simply creating your own! it’s by using instant journalist, you can make your own news site and keep people posted with the news you feel is important out there. breaking news on the weekly behaviors of your cat? sure you can make a page! more seriously though, you can try to get scoops on modern issues, events, and interest stories and keep people connected to your site by tagging. or at least that’s how i understand it.while i feel like this is good in terms of getting the news that needs to be brought out into the open into, well, the open, i can’t help but wonder what this is doing to the actual journalism field. do they support citizen journalism with the mantra of “all news is good news! the public must know!” or begrudge it when citizen journalists get the scoops first or report on issues the mainstream media wants to ignore? and if it is so simple to be a citizen journalist, how does this affect those who study and work toward that goal? CNN seems to be on board, even creating their own site. but what is the general feelings of journalists to citizen journalists? yay or nay?
As a 2nd yr of the journalism program, citizen journalism makes me angry. The whole time in my journalism classes, our writing is molded and scraped into an almost indistinguishable form. We have to follow all these stupid conventions and I think it really hurts the news that we’re trying to put forth. Citizen journalists can get around all of that. While working at another profession, they arguably do a better job with a webcam and a website than we do in our professional offices. Independent journalists don’t have to follow the biases of the professional–in fact, though they have personal biases, these are transparent, making them more trustworthy. To make matters worse, news businesses are starting to play to the citizen journalists, paying them for their stories. I guess, I’m just jealous. By choosing journalism as a profession, I can’t take the opportunity that web2.0 has created. I’m doomed to convention.