We defined citizen journalism as "the audience participating in news media." The way that the media portrays citizen journalism it seems like a new outlandish concept. However, it kind of brings up a "chicken or the egg" situation. Clearly, journalism was a lot more monitored and focused in the early ages but in the end, even if it was mainly being sent out for the government it was still information for citizens. If citizens were engaging and reading the news, then that opened up the floodgates for citizen journalism.
Back in the day it clearly was not as easy to speak your opinion about the news and get it heard far across the world, but now you can do that with the click of a button. Some people look at this easy accessibility as an extreme disadvantage to journalism and the profession. I would agree that it most certainly has it's disadvantages such as the extremely easy ability to start and spread rumors around the world in under 5 minutes. However, it also has the great possibilities to spread the word of a national crisis in under 5 minutes. Websites such as http://www.twitter.com have revolutionized the way we report and receive news. Not only does the news have the ability to be in our hand, but also delivered to us on almost a real time scale.
I understand that a lot of journalists and professionals are becoming upset with the fact that bloggers are being addressed as journalists because one of the most important aspects of journalism is accuracy and bloggers are more apt to mess up without an entire crew behind them to help them. However, I do not think that we should simply throw the citizens to the back of the bus and tell them to stay there and let the big kids do the work.
I really admire the ideas of citizen add-on reporting and open source reporting. Citizen add-on employs citizens to add on to what reporters have already written, while open source reporting is more of a participatory collaborative effort. By bringing the citizens and consumers in to work with the providers, it will help the news media to be more keen on what the citizens actually want to hear. Also, it will provide a touch of the city or state that the reporter is writing about. Anyone can write a review or a story about something, but if they have never actually experienced it it becomes nothing more than a fiction almost.
I do not see professional journalism dying away anytime soon, but I definitely do see a continuous rise in amateur journalism and hope to see a lot more collaborations happen.
