Citzen Journalism and Traditional journalism

Citizen journalism can be looked at people participating in or reporting the news. In this day and age this is made easy because of all of the outlets people have. If people have a cell phone with text messaging or the internet they can participate in citizen journalism. So many people in the world now have a cell phone (or two) that they can take pictures and send to each other. With the internet on phones now becoming a growing necessity with many people. Now with all of the things that are offered with phones people are able to communicate with each other twenty-four hours of the day seven days a week. This also makes it possible to keep track of everything that happens in their lives, and the lives of others. People can document the happenings in every day because of all of the technology that is available to them, whereas years ago people had to write things down on paper and document things that way, which is called traditional journalism.

Citizen journalism as stated above could be anything that is documented and released to the world or any amount of people for that matter. With the creation of cell phones and the capabilities they have citizen journalism has become easier over the years, which also means that the growth of the citizen journalism industry is growing as well and traditional journalism is decreasing. This is good for some people but bad for the majority of the major journalism places. In today’s society people have to fight to get the news out first. Many newspapers or television stations compete to be the first to report something, though it is becoming a struggle with all of the people reporting it from their cell phones. People can record a video on their phone and send it out in an email or post it online and that would be reporting it, which means it is citizen journalism. Though the regular people that are posting videos or stories online via phone won’t necessarily get the validity that the news stations get; when people watch the news or read the paper they are reading it because it is a valid source. Whereas when people read things posted by other people online they may question whether or not it is valid, and this would create one con for citizen journalism.
There are many pros for citizen journalism and most are discussed above. To restate the pros would be being able to report the news as it is happening from your cell phone. People wouldn’t need to wait to read the newspaper to see what is happening or what has happened in previous days. Even since the creation of the television citizen journalism has been around. With the growing advances in technology the news around the world can get reported within seconds of it happening with cell phones.

Though, one could argue that citizen journalism is not as reliable as traditional journalism. Traditional journalism has more merit behind the stories that they are reporting. There is more research and truth that is found within the traditional journalism stories. When people report for newspapers they actually talk to sources to find what is really going on and the reasons behind it. They just don’t report what is going on; they go in depth to make sure that their stories have validity to a certain story. In most cultures the traditional media or journalism is starting to fade, which is a shame because a lot of the stories that are reported are great stories and ones that take a lot of time to prepare. It may seem as though people aren’t interested in the stories that were researched they care more about the citizen type of journalism. Though, citizen journalism is very convenient, it may not be as reliable as traditional journalism.