Fake News

Citizen Journalism is when a members of the public play an active role in collecting, reporting, analyzing and disperse news and information to the rest of the public. I feel that citizen journalism is a movement.

This movement has been developed over time and it’s now explosive with outlets on the web such as Twitter, Youtube and the many blogs that are self run by an individual. Not all of these outlets are used for telling breaking news stories or information that applies to the general public, they have have something different and sometimes insightful.

I feel that this is important because it gives journalism a third dimension. People are stepping out of the boundaries of only letting professionals telling the news stories and providing the public with information, their taking the matters into their own hands. This is can provide the public with a fresh new out look on an old topic, or give them something new that they would never suspect from a conventional news source.

“John Seely Brown, chief scientist of Xerox Corp., further elaborates on participatory journalism in the book The Elements of Journalism: ‘In an era when anyone can be a reporter or commentator on the Web, ‘you move to a two-way journalism.’ The journalist becomes a ‘forum leader,’ or a mediator rather than simply a teacher or lecturer. The audience becomes not consumers, but ‘pro-sumers,’ a hybrid of consumer and producer.’ ”(Browman, and Willis)

I completely agree with this statement. The audience is now the ‘prosumer’. This means that the audience is an active part of the new movement and they are becoming the ones who have the information that other people want to read.

I think that this has become a popular way of gaining news information, because its new to the public. I know that when I’m looking at news or information I want the subject to be different then it would be conventionally, and I want it to be delivered in a more appealing way then just in a newspaper. I think that the public feels the same way.

Work Cited

Browman, Shayne, and Chris Willis. "We Media ." Hypergene. July 2003. The Media Center, Web. 7 Oct 2009. <http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/download/we_media.pdf>.