Citizen Journalism Is A Threat To News Industries

CITIZEN JOURNALISM IS A THREAT TO NEWS INDUSTRIES
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Citizen Journalism is a Threat To News Industries
The concept of citizen journalism is essentially based on ordinary members of the public playing an active role in which they gather, report, analyze, and disseminate news and information. Put simply, private individuals perform the same tasks as professional journalists and press officers perform. The information they report could take various forms, for instance a blog or podcast editorial and may include video, audio, pictures or text (Holt & Karlsson 2015, p. 1799). There is a growing debate of whether citizen journalism poses an opportunity or threat to professional reporters. This paper addresses the question: Does citizen journalism present a threat to news industries? The paper argues that to a large extent, citizen journalism in fact poses a threat to the news industries, although it provides opportunities to a small extent.
The proliferation of the Internet as well as other new technology devices has led to a trend in which individuals cover events and disseminate content immediately and easily. Digital tools such as micro-blogging, social networks, mobile devices and blogs allow people to cover their own communities and publish their own stories. This is what is known as citizen journalism and has a great impact on the way the mainstream media work. It is the reporting of news events by ordinary citizens with the use of the Internet to disseminate the information. Citizen journalism, as Bekken (2017, p. 1276) pointed out, could be as simple as reporting of news and facts which is mainly disregarded by the mainstream media firms. Citizen journalism may act as a check on the reporting of the mainstream companies in the news industry by offering alternative analysis.
Citizen journalism poses a threat to the mainstream professional journalists in the news industry and a large number of professional journalists have complained about this rise in citizen journalism as the triumph of amateurism over professionalism. New media technologies including Blogger, Facebook and Twitter have allowed ordinary people to transmit information internationally; a power that was reserved only for big media companies in the past. Also, the growing accessibility, speed and presence of advanced cellular phones and other media sharing devices, as Mythen (2010, p. 45) pointed out, has given civilian reporters the ability to report on news events not just to a larger, international audience, but also faster in comparison to professional journalists. This form of news coverage is essential to journalism in the present day; ordinary people being unrestricted, relatable and available to capture footage and photos of news events as they break in different parts of the globe (Rosen 2010, p. 35).
With media convergence and the explosion of digital media innovation, Noor 2013 (p.55) pointed out that citizen journalism is currently able to reach a broad array of people. News contents these days are being delivered on more and more platforms, including laptops, mobile phones, smart phones, tablets, personal computers among other devices. The advanced connectedness and development in onlin...