Does Citizen Journalism Present A Threat To News Industries?

Citizen reporting is playing a complementary role to mainstream reporting.
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Citizen reporting is playing a complementary role to mainstream reporting
The emergence of new technology has led to the development of new ways of getting information that seems to challenge the traditional approaches. One of these new approaches is citizen journalism. Citizen journalism is the approach where individuals can collect and share information without relying on the conventional methods. These forms of journalism is rapidly evolving and allowing ordinary people to report about things happening around them. The news sources such as the intent, blogs, web portal and social network sites are quickly becoming more reliable in providing up to date information thus threatening the mainstream media. The current study seeks to look at how journalist looks at citizen journalism and the role of citizen journalism in the society. Ideally, civil Journalism is not a challenge to mainstream media but rather a complement to sharing information within the society.
Introduction
Citizen journalism as a concept in media is the idea where the ordinary people take over the journalistic activities. Ideally, the citizens take up the responsibility of reporting issues that they are facing. The proliferation of these forms of journalism has opened up the avenue for people to discuss share and confront issues that their societies are going through. People that engage in such form of journalism are called citizen journalist. Campbell, 2015 looks at citizen journalist as a person who has not undergone any form of training but can still report on the issue around their communities. Over the years these citizen journalists have always just been termed as the audience of the mainstream media. However, over the years these people have transformed from just being an audience, and now they participate in the process of passing information. Campebell, (2015) mentions that previously the audience was at the receiving end of the media reporting, but now they engage in the pattern of broadcasting of information. It is during these eras that the citizen journalists have emerged.
There are still other diverse and varying views towards citizen journalism. One of the opinions is presented by Peters and Witschge, 2015, who looks at citizen journalism as the democratic or somewhat participatory journalism. Peters and Witschge, 2015, seems to present the idea that the citizens are engaged in the active process of receiving collecting and sharing information. Other scholars have also looked at this kind of journalism as open source journalism, civil, public journalism, and crowd-sourced journalism. All these are forms of reporting that are related to citizen journalism. However, Bowman and Willis came up with a rather inclusive definition. Their view is that this kind of journalism involves non-professionals being actively involved in the collecting analysis and reporting of information. The definition is more inclusive since it seeks to take into account any form of citizen participation in the process of sharing news.
The emergence of the internet spaces has provided greater opportunities for the citizen journalist to flourish. Toda...