First and foremost, term of citizen journalism refers to a
wide range of activities in which everyday people contribute information or
commentary about news events. With the availability of digital technologies,
people now have unlimited access to the tools of production and distribution.
Some people use blogs, Wikipedia, digital storytelling applications, photo and
video-sharing sites, and other online media in the effort of establishing
citizen journalism. By opening access to anyone to cover the news, citizen
journalism presents a more personal perspective of an event and has a potential
to gather people who share a common interest. As an example, through blogs,
citizen journalists have broken stories about political corruption, police
brutality, and other issues of concern to local and national communities.
Educause Learning Initiative in www.educause.edu/eli proposes some
positive sides of working on citizen journalism are making its contributors to
think critically yet objectively, understanding the context holistically so
that their representation of events is useful to others, as well as forming a
deeper connection with the subjects of their investigations. Citizen journalism
also encourages students to think critically about what it means to be
unbiased, to present competing viewpoints, and to earn readers’ trust. In
learning process, students can sharpen their media literacy skills, making
those students better able to assess online information and use it in
appropriate ways. It gives students the opportunity to receive community
feedback on their contributions, helping them estimate their comprehension of a
subject, and it provides students with authentic learning tasks, dealing with
communities of users beyond the walls of the classroom.
Flew (2007: 5) says that there are
three elements of digital media technologies that are critical to the rise of
citizen journalism and citizen media. The first is open publishing. The development of an open publishing
architecture by Mathew Arnison and others involved in the ‘Active Sydney’ group
in 1999, and the adoption of such open source models by the Independent Media
Centres (Indymedia) that year
was a landmark development in enabling new forms of news production. Second, collaborative editing is vital to
citizen journalism. According to Bruns (2005, in Flew: 2007) differentiates
such sites on the basis of the scope for user participation at the input stage
(contributing stories), output stage (ability to edit or shape final content),
response stage (ability to comment on, extend, filter, or edit already
published content), and the extent to which specific roles (editor, journalist,
user, reader) are fixed in the production process.
A third factor promoting citizen
journalism is distributed content through
RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) feeds. The great virtue of
RSS is that it can take the work out of accessing new and interesting
information, as users can establish an ongoing link with the sites that
generate content that is of interest to them, and link to it on their own sites
as they see fit. While RSS development has occurred at some distance from the
concerns of citizen journalism, it greatly assists it by reducing the search
costs associated with accessing valuable information and insight from trusted
sources, as well as building user communities, thereby transforming news and
information distribution from a hierarchical, top-down model with high barriers
to entry to a more decentralized and networked model.
The support of mobile media makes it
possible to learn anywhere: in the home office, at field offices, in the field,
in shopping mall, or in transit. Mobility offers more opportunities for
learning. Horton and Horton stated that mobile learning must compete with other
uses of the learner’s time and must instruct effectively in noisy, distracting
environments. And, learning content must fit the small screens and adapt to
wireless connection speeds.
As stated earlier, one of the most
popular ways in practicing citizen journalism is blogging. As mentioned in http://thegadgetnet.com, blog derives from
the words web log which is similar to online diary. Here, blogger (named for
blog user) can write stories and upload pictures or music at about the same
time. Seeing its form, blog is a combination of e-mail, personal site, diary,
and massage board. Blog principally emerged in 1997 and gained popularity as a
medium of communication in the cyber world. Basically, it has two main forms,
as a diary and as a message board. Principally, the last mentioned type enables
blogger to express his ideas in various topics and gets feedback from other
bloggers.
Putra (2005: 144-148) stated that
the advantages of blogging are its capability to be renewed or changed
information anytime, as well as gain comment and feedback almost instantly.
Recently, blog becomes a media to build community. Bloggers with same interest
and orientation can share recent idea and information. Blogging technology also
gives access to bloggers to link each other’s blog that enriches the readers
with diverse perspectives. In recent times, the ease of access on mobile
technology, like cellular phone, has triggered an enormous development of blogging.
Bloggers can possibly send article, picture, video and comment through mobile
devices.
A strong concern in the recent
development of citizen journalism is ethics, in particular, blogging ethics
that is predominantly needed. Blood (2002: 114-121) stated that journalistic
codes of ethics seek to ensure fairness and accuracy in news reporting. Yet,
there is no such ethics that is agreed by the entire citizen journalists. Blood
then proposes six standards in blogging that can be seen as proposed norms for bloggers,
as follows.
If
your statement is speculation, say so. If you have reason to believe that
something is not true, either don't post it, or note your reservations.
2. If material exists online, link to
it when you reference it.
Linking to referenced material allows
readers to judge for themselves the accuracy and insightfulness of your
statements. Online readers deserve, as much as possible, access to all of the
facts — the Web, used this way, empowers readers to become active, not passive,
consumers of information. Further, linking to source material is the very means
by which we are creating a vast, new, collective network of information and
knowledge.
If you find that you have linked to a
story that was untrue, make a note of it and link to a more accurate report. If
one of your own statements proves to be inaccurate, note your misstatement and
the truth. Ideally, these corrections would appear in the most current version
of your weblog and as an added note to the original entry. If you aren't
willing to add a correction to previous entries, at least note it in a later
post.
Changing or deleting
entries destroys the integrity of the network. The Web is designed to be
connected; indeed, the weblog permalink is an invitation for others to link.
Anyone who comments on or cites a document on the Web relies on that document
(or entry) to remain unchanged. The network of shared knowledge we are building
will never be more than a novelty unless we protect its integrity by creating
permanent records of our publications.
Quickly
note any potential conflict of interest and then say your piece; your readers
will have all the information they need to assess your commentary.
When a serious article comes from a
highly biased or questionable source, the weblogger has a responsibility to
clearly note the nature of the site on which it was found. If you are afraid
that your readers will discount the article entirely based on its context,
consider why you are linking it at all. If you strongly feel the piece has
merit, say why and let it stand on its own, but be clear about its source. Your
readers may cease to trust you if they discover even once that you disguised —
or didn't make clear — the source of an article they might have evaluated
differently had they been given all the facts.
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