Citizen Reporters

Definition: Where members of the public participate in the reporting of news events. Often this is when people are the first witnesses on the ground as events take place.

Community Journalists / Community Media – provide coverage of news stories and events that they witness in their locality.

It is clearly incompatible with a healthy democracy to allow a handful of powerful and often politically ambitious media owners to set the news and information agenda. We run the risk of limiting the diversity and range of opinion given public expression.

The idea behind Citizens Journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the internet to create, augment or fact check media on their own or in collaboration with others.

Examples:

• Write about a council meeting and send the content to Citizens Eye for online viewing
• You could fact-check a newspaper article from the mainstream media and point out factual errors or bias on Citizens Eye
• You might snap a digital photo of a newsworthy event happening and post it on the site
• You might digitally record a similar event and post it on the site

Citizens Journalists are the people formerly known as the audience. We were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another – and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

Citizens Journalism is a growing trend throughout the world and below are a few websites worth looking at:

Huffington Post

Newsvine

Centre for Citizen Media

Citizen Press

OhMyNews (South Korea)

http://www.kcnn.org/

http://www.ojr.org/

http://www.citmedialaw.org/

http://www.worldvoicereport.com/

http://cijo.wikispaces.com/

http://www.cctvcambridge.org/node/685/play/

http://www.localjournalism.net/