This past weekend, Mike Wolenski and I traveled across the country to San Francisco for the National Conference for Undergraduate Research where we presented our research. My presentation was on citizen journalism. This topic is so interesting to me because it’s very current. News outlets all over the world are trying to blindly navigate their way through this different option of doing the news. I say “blindly” because there are no rules or guidelines for this yet. It’s definitely exciting to follow.Just today I saw an example of citizen journalism on NBC Nightly News. They used video from the Virginia Tech campus that someone shot on their cell phone. It was such a small, simple addition to the newscast, but it was a piece of information that the audience otherwise wouldn’t have seen since the professional journalists weren’t there. This is not at all meant to belittle the work of the producers and correspondents covering the shooting, but it shows that there is a place for audience participation in news.
2 comments:
I've been following that story today on the various news sites and I noticed how the citizen journalism was being applied. It really is quite interesting. (Oh, journalistic mind, I cannot escape thee!)
Hope SanFran was fun!!
It also shows how technology is making everything have a sense of immediacy. Anyone can whip out their digicam or cellphone and capture the action.
I think networks like CNN should be happy that citizen journalists are out there, because that's basically all they rolled yesterday... that cell phone footage from campus.
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