According to Mary Grace Antony
and Ryan J. Thomas, citizen journalism is “the act of a citizen, or a group of
citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting,
analyzing and disseminating news and information…[in order to] provide
independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy
requires” (Antony and Thomas, 2010, p. 1284). People have found that blogs give
people an outlet to express themselves on personal, semi, and professional
levels. They give users the opportunity to voice their opinions on subject
matter that they feel is important to them and relevant to their communities.
Blogs offer a way to promote new ideas, push established but little known ones
by providing details about them, and gather the ideas and opinions of readers.
Many of the blogs and vlogs (video
logs) I read are written by everyday citizens who have created a substantial
following of readers because they offer information that people want. One such
blogger is Franchesca Ramsey, who goes by the names “chescalocs” and “chescaleigh”
on her YouTube page (http://www.youtube.com/user/chescalocs
and http://www.youtube.com/user/chescaleigh, respectively), and Franchesca on her website, http://franchesca.net/category/blog/.
Ramsey currently has a combined 178,961 subscribers between her two YouTube
pages. She features videos about “lock” (or dreadlock) maintenance and styles,
graphic design, and social issues, such as “slut shaming” and Obamacare. She
became famous for her video “Shit White Girls Say…to Black Girls” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylPUzxpIBe0),
which spawned a series of reaction videos. Her videos discuss numerous social
issues while including humor and parodies. I make an effort to watch her videos
and read her blog because I feel that she has a grasp on the issues she covers.
The Internet features several other blogs like this one, but some blogs are not
as light-hearted.
I have found that since the
9/11 attack, and the subsequent “War on Terror,” and because of the increased
popularity of social media, such as YouTube, Facebook, Blogger, and WordPress,
users have found a means to discuss social, political, and economical issues
that are not reported in detail in traditional media. Take for instance the numerous
videos on YouTube that are available for our viewing. If you type in “Boston
Marathon bombing,” YouTube pulls up 1,130,000 videos, many of them being actual
footage from the bombing. When I watched the news the day of the incident and
saw how much raw footage was included in the news report, I was amazed. In the
midst of such tragedy, people found the time to pull out their cell phones and
record what was happening around them then send it to news stations. Had it not
been for this footage, America and the world would not have been able to see
and what it felt like, to an extent, to be in the shoes of the runners,
families, and spectators there at the finish line. Without this footage, we
would not have gotten so detailed a story as we did, because the media there at
the event would have only been able to provide only a limited perspective of
what happened.
Web and video blogs also give
people the “guts” to say what they mean, and when they find there are others
who agree with them, they continue to produce stories that their audiences want
to read. After I searched for videos about the Boston Marathon bombing, I typed
in “Trayvon Martin” and got 2,760,000 results. As I was scrolling through the
results list, I came across a video titled “Trayvon Martin Body After Being
Shot Dead By Zimmerman & The Last Moments Of His Life!” that was uploaded
by a user named “TNN Raw Uncut.” He also included his Twitter name @tjsotomayor
in the video. I was caught off guard when I saw this title as I am sure anyone
else would be. I clicked on the link to see just what the user had to say, and
he stated in his introduction that viewers would get “nothing but news, raw and
uncut, with no filters or script.” I did
not watch the video beyond the initial introduction and his lead-in to the
subject matter because of what the title said. After thinking about the
discussion on citizen journalism we had in class, I could not help but think
that his video and several others on this subject and other controversial
topics take information to the extreme to get viewers. TNN Raw Uncut has 63,405
subscribers, and his video was viewed 803,756 at the time of this blog post. Is
commentary like this what people want, the extreme version of news that
traditional media cannot and will not report?
Blogs promote citizen journalism
by allowing users the freedom to write what they feel and know from a
humanistic point of view. Where traditional journalism allows for unbiased news
reports, citizen journalism gives users the leeway to write what the people
really want to read, hear, and see. I have often found how different news
stations report stories from different the news reports on an issue from
different slants, and depending on how the story is reported, several key
points are left out, often leaving a biased report. Granted, citizen journalism
is subject to a high level of bias, but if affords the opportunity for
non-professional writers to fill in the holes left behind in traditional news
reports.
Because citizen journalism
gives people the information that they want the way they want it, people are
more inclined to trust it. As a result, bloggers are more inclined to continue
to report on issues that they feel their audiences want to know more about,
including government conspiracies, the fate of the economy, and civil
injustices. Moreover, because of the lack of restraint that blogs have in
comparison with traditional news outlets, which are imposed with so many rules,
bloggers can offer their stance on an issue and get as detailed in their
reports as they want. This independence from professional restrain raises
issues of credibility, professionalism, and ethics. As purveyors of “news,” citizen
journalists, especially those with a large following, remember that they have
readers who will believe anything they read. They also must remember that with
their popularity and their large readerships, the information they disseminate
can “go viral,” leading to great benefits or dire consequences for the blogger
and for the news source.
References
Antony, Mary Grace & Ryan J. Thomas. (2010). “‘This is citizen
journalism at its finest’: YouTube and the public sphere in the Oscar Grant
shooting incident.” News Media Society,
12(8): 1280-1296. doi:
10.1177/1461444810362492
TNN Raw Uncut. (2013, July 13). “Trayvon Martin Body After Being Shot Dead By Zimmmerman & The
Last Moments Of His Life!” [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT25vOWgsfQ
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