P2- Citizen Journalism

The phrase ‘citizen journalism’ refers to when the general public take part in the news through multiple different ways. These ways are; collecting, analysing and spreading news. This concept allows the audience to interact and get involved with the news, the term prosumer (producer and consumer) was created due to the increase in audience members becoming the news source.

Audiences can contribute to the news in many different ways due to the increased development and use of media and technology. One of these is through a comment section. They’re often found in some articles and all across social media. They allow the audience to voice their opinions on what the article is based on and to have discussions with each other. This can create an interesting atmosphere for discussion as you can often found very varied opinions and views. This means the news becomes a lot more interactive as people can directly get involved. Social medias involvement does not stop here, with sharing becoming a vital channel of distribution for online news sources. Sharing refers to people with social media accounts sending a link to one of their friends (however, it could be anyone). This is a great way for news to be spread as it’s such a quick method of telling people about the news. Due to it being so easy to do, news sources benefit from it largely as not only do more people see their articles but they also receive more traffic onto their social media accounts. This goes towards growing their online presence which is crucial in this age of technology. An important part of social media is the use of hashtags, this is how you get topics to ‘trend’. It means there is a centralised thread for the topic in question, so users can add to it or begin discussing off of things that have been posted to it. This encourages citizen journalism as the function is built for people to be able to communicate. This constantly updating conversation is also an outlet for people to learn more about the topic as articles can only cover so much. If your hashtag trends to a certain extent, it will appear on ‘trending’ pages and sidebars. This can garner even more attention and once again build the new sources online presence.

Blogs are another form of citizen journalism. Even though blogs can be used to talk about anything, many dedicate this online space to reporting news. Blogs allow anyone with an internet connection and an email address to start composing news articles (or anything they want) and lets them share it with the rest of the internet. You can insert text, images, videos and a number of different widgets that not only make your blog more interesting but also easier to use. Money can even be made with enough regular visitors and they can be linked to a social media account so its’ online presence can grow. One blog that stands out is called ‘Mashable’. This was founded in 2005 by Peter Cashmore, it was firstly solely written by him and has developed since to become a largely popular online news source. It focuses on technology related news and is a regular attendee on Snapchats featured stories, giving it a potential reach of 150 million users daily(http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/2/11839394/snapchat-passes-twitter-in-daily-active-users), just on this channel of distribution. This shows us the power of citizen journalism and how it can develop. Even though this is not citizen journalism anymore, it provides encouragement to all of those who are thinking about starting their own blog/news source. A large citizen journalism based news source is WikiNews. This is produced completely by the general public, with anyone being able to submit articles. This is great as it gives people an established platform to voice their opinions.