Cyber media has become a very important tool in recent years, drawing attention to issues that the traditional media couldn't touch. Such was the case in Iran recently, where citizen journalists have been the only source of news of the political unrest, as journalists were too heavily censored[1]. Thanks to citizen journalists with camera phones, we are provided with plenty of footage of peaceful demonstrations and the brutality inflicted by Iranian officials.
But in that same example of the videos coming out of Iran, we see the problem with cyber journalism. While the videos collected are incredibly important, they're blurry, hard to follow, unorganized, and often lack almost any clear facts in terms of clear figures, times, names, etc. This is often also the problem with Blogs. They're typically tailored to a much smaller audience than the mainstream media[2]. Thus, it's easy for them to be much more extreme. In addition, they're held to a lesser standard that traditional media. While traditional media is far from perfect when it comes to reporting facts instead of fiction, blogs are usually even worse, being unmonitored and ungoverned. Most blogs are simply passionate people saying what they believe[3].
Despite the faults of cyber media and citizen journalism, their usefulness in bring to light issues otherwise ignored or off limits cannot be denied. Because of this, many traditional media outlets have begun incorporating elements of cyber media and citizen journalism into their framework, with "I-reporting" segments and hosting their own blogs[4].
A yahoo with a camera phone or someone with too much time on their hands and a blog will never be a substitute for a real journalist. As time goes on the value of cyber journalism becomes more and more apparent, and cyber journalism will continue to grow. But it could never really replace the traditional established media, due to it's slow, clunky, inaccurate nature.
[1] For Neda: English. Directed by Antony Thomas. Youtube.com, 2010. Web.
[2] Valeriu, Dornescu Ioan. "The Relation Between Blogging and Mass Media". International Conference on Virtual Learning. Vol. 1 (2006), 4. Web.
[3] Gill, Kathy E. "How Can We Measure the Influence of the Blogosphere?". Department of Communications, Washington University. (2004), 4. Web.
[4] Valeriu, Dornescu Ioan. "The Relation Between Blogging and Mass Media". International Conference on Virtual Learning. Vol. 1 (2006), 6. Web.
I found your article very interesting and very agreeable. I agree with your statement that a random person with a camera could never replace a traditional journalist. I have often read the "I-reporting" on CNN and found that there are many discrepancies in their story compared to what the "real" journalists report. However, I do think that the "I-reporting" does allow for a far greater level of communication and transparency, globally. I feel as though it also adds a certain level of emotion to news reporting that is not regularly seen on the news networks, for better or worse.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that I-reporting does enlighten issues that are otherwise ignored by the news networks due to their low level of excitement. It seems that in todays era of news, everything is about politics or some shooting or another. WIth I reporting, news is more broad in the sense that more is reported on such as continuing efforts in the Gulf to clean up to oil spill.