How Does Collaborative New Media Influence Journalism?

With most of us possessing devices which can connect to the Internet, we can share our thoughts, photos and videos wherever we go. This circumstance gives rise to a new type of journalism called "citizen journalism". Unlike any conventional journalism, citizen journalism makes good use of the great surge of information every day to build news stories. The idea of this type of journalism is that everyone in the society can be a journalist who witness, record and share events that mean something to him or her, with the fact that digital products and media empower individuals. Journalism is therefore not the same as that in the old days.

 

The line distingusting who audiences and journalists are is thinner than that in citizen journalism. In traditional journalistic practice, these two roles are well-defined. Conventionally, journalists refer to people who engage in the profession. Within this context, the journalist-audience relationship and information flow tend to be one-way-top-down. Unless an audience is a witness of the event that a journalist wants to cover, never can he or she participate in the news production.

 

On the contrary, citizen journalism encourages collaborative and participatory production of news stories; the journalist-audience relationship in this case is an interactive and dynamic one. This kind of journalism utilizes not merely official sources but also social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to write news stories. Social media platforms are rich sources for journalists because we tend to put everything we think is worth sharing onto them. Yet, what journalists try to yield are not our statuses but visual evidence related to the events which cannot be captured on the site or is banned from distribution by the local governments. A journalist called Paul Lewis makes remarks on the pros of citizen journalism in the YouTube video below. Using murder cases as examples, he suggests social media effectively allows journalists and the society to form a relatively more complete reality.

 

  "TEDxThessaloniki - Paul Lewis - Citizen Journalism" from YouTube

 

Last year's Egyptian Revolution is a paradigmatic example of new media facilitating news reporting in autocratic countries. Even though the Egyptian government limited greatly on its freedom of press, the incident was still well-known internationally because the Egyptian protesters and  citizen journalists used Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and blogs to share the news primarily between various local protest groups and, in turn, to the world. Photos and videos uploaded by the activists were used in news reports worldwide. From this case, the power of such collaborative and participatory journalistic practice is highly manifested.

 

From a journalistic perspective, the presence of citizen journalists is beneficial to the society. For journalists, the content of the news stories is more reliable and trustworthy because news sources are now more diverse; news is reported based on fact and evidence from vaious perspectives. As everyone of us can be a citizen journalist, freedom of press is not easily limited by the government. We can therefore use our empowered agency to fight against injustice in our society. 

 

What we gained from the advent of new media is that we can have our say in this world, so essentially we should use new media as constructive and beneficial as possible to others and the society.