Citizen Journalism

LONDON: Videos shot in smoke-filled, bombed-out London underground trains, photos of body-strewn roads – the July 7 bombings on London’s transport system brought the arrival of a new advance guard of amateur reporters to Britain. Media commentators described it as a sea-change in journalism as mobile phone photographers, text messagers and bloggers dominated initial coverage of the bombings that...

Type the words citizen journalism into Google, and you'll get roughly 17 million results. And each will have a different definition for the term. The discussion of the topic generally centres around blogs. Now, blogs are sort of online diary, right? Sometimes that means you're talking about just how cute your toy poodle is -- day after day after day. Entry 3368: "Toy poodle still cute! Click for...

Tribun Timur is a local newspaper in Makassar, the capital city of the Indonesian province of South Sulawesi, which benefits from citizen journalists. It was first published two years ago and has become one of the leading newspapers in Makassar, with a distribution of 50,000 copies and about 120,000 readers. In a talk with Tribun Timur Editor-in-Chief Dahlan, he explained that, as a new newspaper...

A citizen journalist video clip from a concerned citizen about a pregnant woman giving birth on a pavement after being denied admission in a government hospital has created a stir in the Andhra Pradesh capital of Hyderabad. CRUEL INTENTION: A pregnant woman had to perforce give birth on the roadside after being denied admission in a government hospital in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. The incident...

News International chairman Les Hinton has accused 'citizen journalists" of amateurism, misrepresentation and failing to emulate the standards of traditional news organisations. Using the example of coverage of this year's hurricane in New Orleans - where he said bloggers were responsible for "bad information", including reports of unrest and rape that were not later substantiated - he called on...

"Citizen journalism." It's one of the hottest buzzwords in the news business these days. Many news executives are probably thinking about implementing some sort of citizen-journalism initiative; a small but growing number have already done so. But there's plenty of confusion about citizen journalism. What exactly is it? Is this something that's going to be essential to the future prosperity of...

There's something inherently like the "Odd Couple" about the pairing of citizen media with a traditional newsroom. If citizen media is about being all-inclusive, with news as a conversation, old-line media has been about news coming from the mouths and pens of journalists, with the readers left to fend for themselves in the "Letters to the Editor." But when those old-line news organizations go...