CITIZEN JOURNALISM

Citizen Journalism



Citizen Journalism

Introduction

In the past decade, the upsurge of popularity in new media technology, such as the Internet, blogging and participatory publishing, has had an immense impact on the medium of traditional mainstream journalism. Now, more than ever, the profession of journalism is undergoing, what some critics would call “an identity crisis” (Anderson and Ward, 2001, p. 17), and while it has not passed its use by date, journalism needs to start reflecting and rethinking about its new roles and practices among the new media or risk becoming obsolete.

This paper aims to discuss the previous roles that journalism played in society, how these roles are changed by the popularity of the new media and how the profession of journalism is evolving in the age of new media technology. Finally, it aims to provide insight into what journalism today should acknowledge and take into consideration if it wishes to continue to thrive.

Discussion

The rise of new media, such as the Internet, however, has had a powerful impact on traditional journalism; so powerful, critics have been suggesting that the profession of traditional journalism should start to reflect on its roles and its practices amidst the rise of the new media (Ewart, 2004). So with the rise of the Internet, traditional news media no longer can label themselves the “communicative core of the democratic process” (Anderson and Ward, 2007, p. 17). Bardoel and Deuze (2001) propose that the Internet is changing journalism in at least three ways: the Internet has the potential to make journalists redundant as mediator forces in a democratic society, it will also provide media professionals a wide variety of resources and technological options to work with, and finally, the Internet has paved a new category of journalism, what is known as online journalism (cited in Bardoel and Deuze, ...