Taking Control - Journalism

When one thinks of citizen journalism, the words of "public", "engagement", "freedom", "guerrilla", or "casual" comes to mind almost immediately. A play by play account of incidences and event by the public citizens, an active role in the whole process of relating bits and pieces of information to the rest of the world - a world where is there no gatekeeping, or rather lesser gatekeeping as compared to those of traditional media. Citizen journalism is rather a specific form of both citizen generated content and media, as compared to community, civic, or collaborative journalism where the other three are practiced by professional journalist, citizen journalism is purely by the citizens for the citizens. 

The impedance of new media technology, such as social networking and media-sharing websites, and the ever increasing pervasiveness of mobile phones, is creating a sphere where citizens of the world are getting content they did not even know they need. With the possibilities of online sharing being encapsulated in devices handy, convenient, and available, citizens around the world can gather forces and report news faster than what a traditional media sharing communicator can. 

Paul Lewis, head of multimedia special projects at The Guardian speaks of the case of political refugee Jimmy Mubenga, whose 2010 death on an airplane was attributed to illness and not foul play. Lewis and Matthew Taylor utilised crowd sourced information from different social and media sharing sites, to come out with a breakthrough truth of Mubenga having actually died of asphyxiation. Lewis had looked into another case of Ian Tomlinson, whose death at the 2009 G20 protests in London was said to be caused by a heart attack, however, Lewis collected evidences from footage taken by other citizen journalist who was present at that point of Tomlinson's assault by the police, and managed to prove how Tomlinson's death was caused not by natural causes, but rather a brutal beating by the Metropolitan police. 

The power of citizen journalism is not to be taken lightly, there are situations and events that can be uncovered by the accessibility of citizen generated content and information. Some instances remain where the citizens not only contribute to NEW information on the net, but rather as accompanying information to existing professional news sites. For example: 

• Readers are able to include their comments along stories done by professional reporters, an immediate response and feedback for both the readers and journalists. Take heed to post proper comments as well, since comments are vetted in certain sites. 

• An inclusive additional information site in concordance with the information given by professional journalists.Where citizen journalists are able to add on information that professional journalist might have been unable to touch on due to space and time constraints, or perhaps due to gate keeping done by the editor. 

• Collaborative Journalism - where both professional and citizen journalists are working together to form a story. Where there might be certain issues where the professional journalist is not as adept at, and this can be combated with the presence of a citizen journalist, where information can be gathered through other means. All information which is deemed as necessary will then be incorporated into the main story. 

• Or you can just be a Citizen Journo Cat ^__^