Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Who can be a Citizen Journalist?

The concept of Citizen Journalism is a totally new one. It involves members of the public who play a major role to collect, correlate, and report, analyze and disseminate news and information. The media could be the text, video or a combination depending on availability and convenience. Obviously, Citizen Journalists provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information which is what democracy needs.

Citizen journalists are people who do not usually possess any professional journalism training but can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others.

Puneities hail the Citizens' Manifesto : India 2067 campaign

‘…..Thereafter, some citizens came forward and voiced their opinions on the issues that plague our society and suggested as what can be done to help curb these problems. Among them was a prominent Merinews CJ from Nasik Prabir Ghose, who suggested that ’no-vote’ option should be introduced in Electronic Voting Machines. …’

http://www.indiaprwire.com/pressrelease/publishing/2008072911545.htm

‘ … More recently, Allvoices launched in July 2008. Its CEO, Amra Tareen, is a Muslim American and former venture capitalist who created the site after having done charity work in her native Pakistan. While there she noted there was no central hub on the Internet where anyone, anywhere could witness and then instantly report from their perspective news as it happened. Allvoices uses a combination of technology and community to vet stories for authenticity and popularity. The site takes contributions from around the world via any Internet-connected device and its contributors frequently break stories before the mainstream media. Allvoices was also the first citizen journalism site to measure the credibility of contributed reports and their authors, providing readers with a gauge launched in March 2009 for assessing the accuracy of news accounts…..’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism

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