Let’s say there is a big protest happening in your city. You feel passionate about the topic, so you go and join the protesters.
You are capturing different moments of this event and uploading the photos and videos on your Facebook page to show the audience what’s happening at the protest and how the whole scene is progressing.
The audience is learning about the issue through the materials you provide, which gives more clarity and awareness on the overall topic.
That’s exactly what Citizen Journalism entails, and in this article, we will learn all about this style of reporting, go through its history, and give examples of regular citizens taking the initiative to shed light on a specific issue.
What Is Citizen Journalism?
From the news outlet’s perspective, citizen journalism entails collecting pieces of information about a specific subject, mainly from different public platforms and social media channels shared by the public.
In other words, this process is all about ordinary members of the public taking the initiative to collect and distribute a specific piece of information online.
Generally, there are two main ways to become a citizen journalist and provide useful materials to your local media outlets.
- Report News Stories on Your Own: Share stories, facts, and images through your social media channels, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, or use your blog website to expand on those stories and give a full overview of a subject.
- Work With Already Existing News Organizations: Helping already established media outlets by providing them with useful materials to report the story. You can do this by commenting on articles, crowdsourcing, or live blogging.
For example, imagine there is a massive snowstorm in your hometown, affecting local communication systems and disrupting the everyday lives of citizens.
In this case, you can simply take pictures and videos of damaged systems that are visible to you and share them on your Facebook page to inform people about the impact of this snowstorm.
You can also send these materials to your local news channel, which is probably working on covering this impactful story and would use your materials to make their reporting more informative and insightful for viewers.
Why Is Citizen Journalism Important?
As we all know, traditional journalism has evolved a lot in today’s day and age. The way people consume information has changed from TV broadcasting channels to online media outlets. Attention spans get shorter, and news spreads much faster than it used to.
This kind of transformation has shown us that citizen journalism is a powerful tool that is shaping the way we receive information about specific subjects.
More specifically, this type of reporting style helps the audience to:
- Receive Information More Efficiently: thanks to citizen journalism, news spreads more easily on social media, reaching millions of impressions in just a matter of minutes.
Achieving this kind of speed is essential for time-sensitive stories such as natural disasters and political protests because providing information in a timely manner can positively impact the situation and save lives.
- Get Different Perspectives of a Specific Story: watching one specific news channel and getting all your information about the story there can form biased opinions and give the wrong perception to the public.
Citizen journalism, by nature, helps avoid these types of situations and gives all sorts of perspectives and opinions about a certain issue, making it easier for the public to make their judgments and choose their sides.
- Engage With Content and Openly Express Opinions: it’s in citizen journalists’ best interests to foster conversations around different topics and start discussions with as many people as possible to get maximum reach.
That way, the general public gets more avenues for expressing their own opinions about the specific issue and discussing information with others to reach a conclusion.
Where Did Citizen Journalism Originate From?
Citizen journalism, as a concept, traces back to the year 2,000. This is when the news platform OhMyNews was born in South Korea. We are talking about a simple platform where anyone can register and contribute to creating a story.
Created by the South Korean entrepreneur Oh Yeon-ho, OhMyNews started out as an online daily newspaper, which gave volunteer reporters an opportunity to submit their responses on a specific subject matter.
By 2007, the platform had grown overseas and successfully managed to reach a staggering 50,000 contributors in 100 different countries.
The creation of online forums on the internet and then the growth of social media platforms gave beginner and amateur journalists a unique opportunity to report news stories and kickstart their careers on their own.
More importantly, this movement helped to accelerate the speed of spreading critical information and gave everyone an opportunity to contribute with their knowledge and expertise.
Examples of Citizen Journalism
Citizen journalism has played a massive role in major political events in the past decades. Besides politics, we have seen lots of examples of this movement during crisis situations where diversity in reporting is essential.
Let’s take a look at some of the most notable examples of citizen journalism and see how the internet contributes to decentralizing the information for the general public:
Political Revolution in Egypt
In the year 2011, political activists in Egypt who were protesting the government of President Hosni Mubarak effectively used the social media platform Facebook to better organize themselves and form groups to fight against the regime.
This event is known as the Arab Spring, and it is one of the famous examples where citizen journalism helped to spread accurate information quickly, which resulted in Mubarak being removed from his post.
Earthquake in Indian Ocean
At the end of 2004, the earthquake in the Indian Ocean caused one of the largest and most impactful tsunamis in the past couple of decades.
Most of the footage from this natural disaster was recorded by everyday citizens and tourists who happened to be near the place at the time – citizen journalism helped to record this impactful event in history.
As the situation was evolving in an instant manner, major news outlets simply had no time to properly do reporting and put together necessary materials on their own.
The “Black Lives Matter” Movement
Social media and citizen journalism were the main reasons why the “Black Lives Matter” movement successfully emerged in 2020.
Mobilizing a massive protest against police brutality and racial discrimination, spreading news in a timely manner, and responding to incidents would have been almost impossible without online communities on Twitter (X) and Facebook.
The organizers of this movement managed to share information about this issue with the world and make sure that every protester was informed of the location and time of a specific activity.
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