What Is Citizen Journalism

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Comment by David Eide on January 4, 2009 at 8:31pm

In doing research for my joblog

I came across this from a Canadian newspaper.

It goes directly to this subject.

Comment by David Eide on January 4, 2009 at 12:47am

It's interesting because science which is supposed to be pure fact has had its hoaxes so if reliability fails at that level it will fail on all levels. I think the consumer of news needs to develop what Hemingway called "the built in bs detector," that comes with experience and knowledge and common sense. They then have to reward the news gathering that proves itself over and over with money and loyalty and let the less reliable go by the wayside. It will take some time to sift through this on the internet because it has no legacy and almost no boundaries. The other skill for the consumer of news is the ability to access all sorts of sources about the same event. If you put news sources side by side you can sense what is credible and what is not I think. The ability to handle vast amounts of information will probably be a key skill to have in this century. I will say this much Robin; if a twitter person says Steve Jobs has died I'm not going to believe it until I see his wife or doctor say it on the CNBC.

Comment by Robin Minnick on January 3, 2009 at 7:09pm

I've been hearing and thinking a lot about this lately. Thanks for posting the video. I think part of the question is sifting out the rants and the fiction to find reliable sources that can be verified. Twitter has been a fascinating source of eye-witness reports, but the question keeps arising: how valid are the posts? On the flip side, even professional journalists get it wrong.

Comment by Daniel H. Smith on December 31, 2008 at 4:16pm

Having worked in citizen journalism for some three-plus years in a major metro market, it has changed the landscape somewhat, but from my experience has still to reach its long strides in proving it viability and demonstrating what its real niche will be in the media world.