Citizen Journalism: Boon, Bane or a mix of Both?

I've learnt that online journalism is not the same as citizen journalism. And that current journalism (readers/consumers/viewers) versus citizen journalism (contributors/participants) is the way journalism has become. We watched a really hilarious Youtube video in class on how to report the news and I realised how reporting of the news has become more of a template, a repetition of style with just a difference in content. It has also dawned on me that the necessary objectiveness and partiality has started to bore audiences and thus drawing them to the websites of citizen journalists. Even traditional journalists like Anderson Cooper and Katie Couric have Twitter accounts which are updated with behind-the-scenes scoops and pictures that were or could not be published on television. In the past, people were fed the story, presently they are no longer passive audiences and prefer engaging in the story.

Some have jumped ship from traditional journalism to hop on to the citizen journalism bandwagon but with possible reservations. In most cases of citizen journalism, the stories being published have either already been covered by mainstream news, a regurgitation of the news with self-opinionated comments or a different angle on the same story. News is not as easy to come by as what was once considered 'hot news' might have been relegated to "yesterday's news". Another issue I was pondering on while the discussion was ensuing in tutorial was the lack of training citizen journalists possessed.

As a journalism student, I have realised the difference in writing for different types of articles; features have a larger word count with a more soft news approach whereas a news story would likely have facts and be straight to the point as a hard story usually would be. Citizen journalists do not have this experience and although the general public may not know the difference in the styles, the field of journalism gets corroded.

People have also become dependent on mainstream media the reliance is too high for audiences to totally disregard the news from more trustworthy and credible sources. Also, as I found out in class, there is a generally low level of user involvement online.