Media Essays News Citizen Journalist

Media Essays News Citizen JournalistNews Citizen JournalistIntroductionWe live in an era of information clog up it requires no groundbreaking analysis to establish this. Society is bombarded from e real angle with intelligence operation Newspapers television streaming intelligence agency services on the Internet and self- computeed blogs written by citizen journalist. This worldwide change has occurred over the course of a minute fourth dimensionscale.Since the dawn of journalism until very of late, there were always a bounded number of news sources. In the 80s there were ten UK dailies, and three cables which contained news bulletins. By 1998, at the dawn of online news coverage, articles were a day old and suffered the disadvantage of non being specifically written as an online medium. Sites were updated once a day, and breaking news would sometimes be cover by a small(a) news ticker at the just about.If we argon to use September 11th as a comparative vantage point, cast close to the present and catastrophic at a worldwide level, the scale of the change indoors the news becomes visible.The 7/11 bombings in the States were viewed in Britain on five terrestrial television channels, three dedicated news channels (BBC News 24, Sky News and ITV News), and news services such as Reuters, CNBC and Bloomberg provided continuous information updates. This does not even attempt to cover the countless other news sources around the world whose focus was to cover this tragic resolution around the clock. The Internet was saturated with theories, creditable news stories and speculation. The Guardian and The New York Times at the time provided online coverage, and since then nearly either news channel has demonstrable online news services.For the first time everyone was capable of acquire their opinion tabu there The Internet allowed people to post their views, share their sadness and sire theories of conspiracy as could never have been done before.On t he 7th July bombings in London BBC 1 and ITV1 had coverage completely uninterrupted until 7pm. Material include heavy(a) amounts of footage sent in by the public, including videos and pictures taken on camera phones.News instanter travels at light speed. The gaps between major news stories, which drop away the publics attention, are hardly long enough to allow absorption of the tier, let alone understanding any greater sense of place tidy sumting within which it may lie.The Internet itself is growing at a massive and uncontrollable rate. According to Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, the search engine would need other three hundred years to successfully list the five million terabytes of data it is approximated the internet now holds. Google has been indexing information for the finishing seven years, and has managed to index somewhere in the region of one hundred and seventy million terabytes.Statement of subjectBecause it has never been easier for individuals to br oadcast their opinion, the divide between what is and isnt considered to be journalism is being change. The power to be published has been extended to anyone who may wish to take it Words no longer need to be passed finished an editorial filter instead the public can broadcast their opinions through blogs, feedback and their hold webpages. on that point are countless online forums and e-zines where the public can submit their own work, and as such there are no official standards because we are no longer tied to words entwined in the ethos of a large corporation. For the individual, when it comes to getting their word out, things have never been let on, and the aforementioned(prenominal) applies to music, filmmaking and photography. To be published no longer certifies a vocational integrity.In my dissertation I am spill to assess the increasingly important role of citizen journalist, and the effect of new media on unconditional reporting. In an article in the Guardian on the 1 2th November 2007, David Leigh points out that our principles are being degraded through the lack of discrimination we exert over sources. Some voices are more creditable than othersa named source is better than an anonymous pamphleteer.Essentially I want to assess whether the reporter is a dying species, overrun by citizen journalist, and in what areas a sense of vocationally based journalistic integrity will prevail and withstand the peripeteia taking place in the media. Reporting staffs are being cut globally, with more and more reporters going dispatchlance. Investigative journalism is on the decline, and citizens are contributing to more stories than ever before.Leigh quotes a BBC Radio 4 interview where John Simpson, the BBCs veteran international news correspondent was asked if all news corporations were cutting back. He confirmed that in his opinion reporters were under real threat, and were not remove anymore, We just want peoples opinions about whats happened, not the facts. In the article Leigh quotes Max Hastings, the ex-editor of the Daily Telegraph, who states that all sorts of areas of the world are now thought to be as well as boring to keep a correspondent there. The commentariat has taken over.Explanation of researchRestrictions of studyThe screeningic I am researching is very broad, and varies very much form place to place. The role of citizen journalist is still developing and maturing. The public are only now fully realising the tog up of independent reporting. There is also a psychological dimension that is constantly changing People are only now beginning to trust articles that do not come from the larger news corporations.Research questions and hypothesisI need to inspect public broadcasting standards, and see what mechanisms are in place to tour of duty the news of larger corporations turning completely into infotainment. I need to find out how much larger news corporations rely on spin departments and bosom offices for their information, and how much investigation is carried out independently.At the moment people rely on news corporations for objective news, and tend to read the work of citizen journalist for a second opinion. My hypothesis is that all of this will eventually invert, and the only form of sincere and detailed reporting will very be that of citizen journalist.Definition of underlying termsIn order to understand this essay, the definition of the term citizen journalist must be clarified. There has been much debate over this topic, and much mix-up has ensued.The Internet is the most effective medium through which the public can dynamically post comments, leave opinions after news stories and feel a direct level of interactivity with their news. While it would seem that this would lead to vandalism, sites such as Wikipedia have demonstrated that there are systems effective at minimising this sort of input, and I will examine this in greater detail later.But the ability to simply broadcas t opinion isnt, nor has it ever been journalism. Audiences have always been harness into the process of news making, whether the input may be in the form of letters to the editor or a clip of video phone footage. disdain the fact that during the 7/7 London bombings contributed video footage was used, public contributions have always been vital to journalists.It is easy to forget that when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, Abraham Zapruder, a member of the public who got the best shot of the assassination, shot the video footage seen across the globe. It was his film that was used by analysts to try and determine from where the president was assassinated.But recently the public have been recruited into the news making process at a much greater level. People are intrigued by people, and want to witness the experiences of others, to modify their news stories. Editors and producers embed stories and experience from members of the public into news stories to give them a more personal dimension. This is the citizen as an addition to a news story.At a greater level of interaction, citizens can help report in a participatory manner, whereby they contribute to a story in the field of their expertise. Their knowledge or guidance is framed within the journalists context. The ability to publish a soft draft of a story on the Internet has make it easier for journalists to gain help from the public to aid a story.Citizen Journalists are too often mistaken for eyewitnesses armoured with new technology. In wake of the 7/7 bombings, people are quick to label the footage and pictures submitted by members of the public as the work of citizen journalist. But I believe citizen journalism entails the bypassing of the commercial news system completely.This is the only way for reporting to not contain the agenda of a large corporation. It can be argued that reporting can never be truly devoid of a personal agenda, but a corporation will inevitably be entwined in a politic al agenda.Citizen Journalist is a term used to describe the actions of amateurs taking it upon themselves to report on subjects in an accurate, and independent manner. It is not to be confused with participatory journalism, where the public are used as sources.Another relevant term is Infotainment, which is essentially a slang term used to describe information given the lurch of entertainment.A summary of what is to followI am going to assess the liberation technological advance has make for citizen journalist, including beneficial and detrimental effects on news production as a whole. I want to see whether there is room for both professional and citizen journalists and whether conventional reporters are a dying species. Using case studies I am going to analyse where stories written by citizen journalist may not have been possible in a larger, corporate journalistic context, and similarly, where reporting would not be possible without the resources available to a larger news corpo ration. As well as this I am going to analyse the trends of corporate news, and asses whether the very roles of citizen journalist and news by larger corporations will invert with serious stories being written by the citizen journalist while corporate news is almost entirely reduced to infotainment.Literature reviewThis topic is relevant because it affects all of the information we receive. The forces of supply and demand work heavily on the corporate news system, and as such are debasing the level of our news. Citizen journalist on the other hand, is relatively free from such forces, and more able to write for niche audiences. There is a new freedom to write honeyately about non-mainstream topics, with the possibility of a worldwide audience.When newspapers first came into circulation, in 15th century German and Flemish states, they lacked the same transfer disposition that they do today. It was the dawn of the industrial revolution and the creation of large cities, the cheapeni ng costs involved in mass printing and the growth of literacy rates provided the market for newspapers in the nineteenth century. Then advertisers realized the true potential for marketing to an ever growing population of newspaper readers, and the costs of newspapers went down even further.The corporate model first took over the Hollywood film industry in 1914, and then the movie distribution system. By 1920 radio had become corporate, and by 1950s television had followed suit. All forms of media were organized in accordance with corporate industrial logic.Government controlled media started to arise in umpteen parts of less highly-developed countries. In Africa and Asia, where power had been handed over to those whom the departing colonial powers were most loose with dealing with. These people were clones of the ruling elite who had once colonised them. Hence the newly emerging media were staf feed by the most Westernised natives. The New World Information gild (NWIO) was crea ted to justify development journalism.The ethos of the organization encouraged state control of the media in order to educate and develop the respective local populations, and in within this line of thinking the education system in developing countries was also shifted into the state run sphere. As Louw points out, Communist control of the media was justified through the same line of argument.In Afro-Asia education and development were managerial tools by which ruling elites (forcibly?) Westernised their populations, thereby increasing the numbers of their own Western tribe. (p.43)One of the most relevant aspects of the Internet, is the creation of an rise to powerible worldwide community that endangers such political mechanisms of control. While once peoples perceptions of life itself were very much narrowed by the culture in which they lived, now people from all over the world have an interface with which they can communicate.The internet has evolved third world countries, with t heir modify and even non existent phone lines missed out on the first generation of the internet. But as technology developed, fibre optic lines and broadband replaced the traditional ways of plugging in, and third-world countries, with no existing infrastructure to replace and facilitated with cheap labour costs, have quickly connected themselves in.The mobile phone revolution was similar basketball team years ago in India if you wanted to make an International call you had to call an operator and book it in. You would then wait by the phone for an arcminute or two, and at some point the operator would call you back and connect you. Now every Indian with a roof over their run also has a mobile. This is an unbelievable phenomenon in a country which frequently still has power cuts, is home to immense poverty and still has a massively unreliable wired phone network. Despite this the prevalence of a mass mobile phone culture took place there even before America had abandoned their two-way.Having come from an Indian background, and with all of my family currently residing there including my fifteen-year-old sister, I have visited the country at least once a year for the last twenty years. I am persistently surprised by the massive changes that occur there from one year to the next, but these are factors relating to matters of economy and monetary development. The most prominent changes have occurred, in my opinion, since the Internet and the mass availability of American cable channels.The standardization of social values simply through observation American cable television is enormous, and the impact on the younger generation is massive when in contrast to their parents. An issue, which is widely ignored in more developed western countries, is the dominance of their media throughout the world, and the lack of correspondence between them and local cultures. The birth of citizen journalist has empowered countless people in less developed countries.But spatial boundaries have been eroded by technology, distance has been tamed and while news once took months or even years to travel, today it travels in the blink of an eye. Because of this the relevance of political borders, and the concept of culture and country has become more peripheral. The importance of the citizen as a reporter, the value of hyper-local news and the democratic nature of the internet as tool for ex puppy loveion is quickly becoming invaluable.In part due to these matters authoritarian states such as China, Cuba and Iran have been forced into move away from their isolation, both ideologically and culturally, and individuals are privy to the writing of journalists not within the borders of their own, controlled domains.Monroe Price asked the question Can a nation state live on in a world in which the boundaries of culture, faith and imagination do not (1995 236). Nation states have survived and, McNair argues in ethnical Chaos, they will hold open to do so. He argues that they will bring into conflict nation states with conflicting ideologies.A brief account of the issues relevant to the topicThe creation of a press department in any company or political organization is a key factor. Journalists rely more and more n the information fed to them by the very people they are seek to write about.*EXPANDWhat is clear is that there will always be some individuals or groups trying to control meaning. Underpinning this is a competition over resources (material, cultural and status). Our life chances are set by the social parameters facilitating or hindering our access to such resources (p25 The Media and Cultural Production Eric Louw, 2001)Technological advances have resulted in a massive, global, spatial dissolution, and are becoming more and more relevant to our lives. This enablement of social realization through geographic space is a concept being dissolved through the advancement of technology. Technology affects the way we write, the footage we c an capture to accompany our stories, and our ability to access the news itself. It is the advancement of technology which has enable the creation of a citizen journalist in the first place.The world is getting smaller, and the amelioration of communicative potential is bringing piece beings closer together. Since the 1980s, and more specifically with the onslaught of live news coverage that CNN brought to the Gulf warfare in 1991, a new sense of immediacy has been brought to the news.There is a new sense of participation, and interactivity that has been brought to broadcasting and the news in general, with broadcasts becoming more dynamic. We can be transported from the isolation of our domestic environments to the parochialism of the news environment we are watching.Through news exposure, which includes the horror of human catastrophe, society is becoming more and more disengaged with the context of what it witnesses. People dont have enough time between major world events to beco me fully acquainted with the context of any particular situation. Broadcasters would rather keep viewers engaged with sensational footage, than bump loosing audiences with a contextual background which could be deemed more boring.As a result people feel that there are too some(prenominal) events to care about any at all, and more importantly there is a widespread concern that we are essentially powerless to do anything about it. Our press has the freedom to fully articulate the injustices of today, but tomorrow there will be new injustices.When the format of the news we are subject to is too consistent and perpetual to never expect not to be shocked by a front page or a top story on a daily basis, we have no choice other than to be emotionally indifferent. McNair describes us as having become fatigued by the propinquity of human suffering (pg 7, Cultural Chaos). The News corporations, governed by the same principles of supply and demand as any other capitalist institutions, have a dvertency born-again our round the clock news coverage into a form of entertainmentof infotainment.One of the primary book I am going to see to it at is We the Media Grassroots journalism, by the people, for the people, by Dan Gillmore. We the Media inspects the blogging phenomenon, and more specifically analyses the relationship between the readers and creators of news.Gillmor acknowledges that blogging is still in an early stage of development, and that in many respects professional journalists are not only behind the developments occurring in news production, but struggling to keep up. He goes on to argue that institutionalized journalism needs a new model of conduct in order to be in a position to fight the good fights.I have also been looking at Cultural Chaos Journalism, news and power in a globalised world by Brian McNair. He draws on examples from the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the London Underground bombings to examine the relationship betw een journalism and power in the digital age. McNair explores the geographic and cultural breakdown-taking place as provoked by the digital age. He examines the impact of the digital age on journalism the effects it has in creating a global culture.There is a fear among news media professionals that the rise of citizen journalist will eclipse the role of the professional journalist. The biggest, and most universal fear is a public reliance on the information provided by citizen journalist will lack the accuracy and objectivity of the larger corporation.Citizen journalists on the other hand feel that the professional media lack the passion or the flexibility to report as accurately or incisively as them. One of the advantages of citizen journalism is that the massive number of amateur writers overshadows the comparatively small number of professional journalists. When people can choose what to write about, it is guaranteed that they will do so with passion. Their articles will be rese arched it can be argued, with greater dedication. Citizen journalist are ruled by no sense of hierarchy as a group citizen journalist can use a skill set appropriate to a project.However, a journalist is merely meant to be a vehicle through which to convey a message. Will this influx of citizen journalism actually diminish objectivity? At least with the mainstream media the public can have an understanding of the context of the paper in which thy read their article. When a different writer, writes every article with no editor to moderate output, can we ever have an understanding of the standpoint of the writer, with no prior knowledge of him or her. On top of this, we cant even count on a set of defining, professional journalistic principles, nor will amateur writer sever have access to the resources of a professional department.Case StudyOn Sunday, April 6th there was an article in the New York Times Observer about an undercover vegan, who set out to expose the horrific conditions of a South California slaughterhouse. To fit in he bought sandwiches made from soy riblets and ate them in a ratty car parking lot with the other workers.Despite his vegan beliefs, this citizen journalist spent long days escorting cows to the kill. Armed with a buttonhole camera, he made sure he was successful in recording images of workers flipping sick dairy cows with forklifts, prodding them with electrical charges and dragging them by their legs with chains so that they could be processed into ground meat. The investigation resulted in the United States authorities taking action at a national level.The film the citizen made was picked up by the mainstream media, and was effective because it was edited in a sensationistically limited manner. Citizen journalism is useful because it allows smaller groups of people to be heard, and the more empowered we become by technological advances, the easier it becomes for us to challenge the images we are exposed to by the mainstream media.