Media Essays News Citizen Journalist

Media Essays raw(a)s Citizen diaristNews Citizen diary keeperIntroductionWe live in an era of info invariablyywhereload it requires no g wheelbreaking analysis to establish this. Society is bombarded from all angle with pass intelligence Newspapers television streaming parole services on the profits and independent blogs indite by citizen diarist. This humannesswide counterchange has occurred e preciseplace the course of a minute condem solid landed estatescale.Since the dawn of intelligence reading media until very deep, thither were always a finite number of intelligence sources. In the 80s there were ten UK dailies, and three channels which contained intelligence service bulletins. By 1998, at the dawn of online intelligence service round to pagin have, articles were a day old and suffered the single out of not being specifically written as an online medium. Sites were updated in one case a day, and breaking intelligence operation would both(prenomina l)times be blot outed by a small tidingsworthiness ticker at the most.If we argon to use folk 11th as a comparative vantage point, lap snug to the pre direct and catastrophic at a populationwide level, the scale of the change within the news becomes visible.The 7/11 bombings in the States were viewed in Britain on cardinal terrestrial television channels, three dedicated news channels (BBC News 24, Sky News and ITV News), and news services such(prenominal) as Reuters, CNBC and Bloomberg provided continuous information updates. This does not even attempt to cover the countless otherwise news sources around the world whose focus was to cover this tragic event around the clock. The Internet was saturated with theories, creditable news stories and speculation. The Guardian and The New York Times at the time provided online coverage, and since whence roughly invariablyy news channel has createed online news services.For the first time everyone was capable of getting their o pinion out there The Internet allowed batch to post their views, sh be their sadness and grow theories of conspiracy as could never retain been done before.On the 7th July bombings in capital of the United Kingdom BBC 1 and ITV1 had coverage completely uninterrupted until 7pm. Material included large amounts of footage sent in by the humanity, including videos and pictures taken on camera environs.News outright travels at light speed. The gaps betwixt major news stories, which steal the humanitys attention, ar hardly long enough to allow intentness of the story, let alone sagacity any greater star of circumstance within which it may lie.The Internet itself is growing at a big and un envisionlable rate. According to Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, the search engine would motive another three light speed forms to palmyl index the five million terabytes of data it is approximated the internet at once holds. Google has been indexing information for the cobble rs last seven years, and has managed to index somewhere in the region of one hundred and seventy million terabytes.Statement of subjectBecause it has never been easier for individuals to broadcast their opinion, the drainage area between what is and isnt considered to be journalism is being narrow. The agent to be published has been extended to anyone who may wish to take it Words no long-lasting need to be passed finished an editorial filter or else the reality passel broadcast their opinions with blogs, feedback and their own webpages.There are countless online forums and e-zines where the public send packing submit their own work, and as such there are no official standards because we are no continuing tied to words entwined in the ethos of a large society. For the individual, when it comes to getting their word out, things have never been better, and the same applies to music, picturemaking and photography. To be published no longer certifies a vocational integrity.In my dissertation I am issue to measure the change magnitudely important role of citizen diarist, and the effect of new media on independent root wording. In an article in the Guardian on the twelfth November 2007, David Leigh points out that our principles are being degraded through the need of distinction we exert over sources. Some voices are to a greater extent creditable than othersa named source is better than an anonymous pamphleteer.Essentially I want to assess whether the reporter is a dying species, overrun by citizen diarist, and in what areas a sense of vocationally based journalistic integrity entrust prevail and withstand the peripeteia taking place in the media. reportage staffs are being cut globally, with more and more reporters going freelance. investigatory journalism is on the decline, and citizens are contri moreovering to more stories than ever before.Leigh quotes a BBC Radio 4 interview where John Simpson, the BBCs veteran world(prenominal) news cor responding was asked if all news corporations were cutting back. He sustain that in his opinion reporters were under real threat, and were not needed anymore, We salutary want peoples opinions active whats happened, not the facts. In the article Leigh quotes Max Hastings, the ex-editor of the Daily Telegraph, who states that all sorts of areas of the world are now thought to be withal boring to keep a correspondent there. The commentariat has taken over.Explanation of researchRestrictions of studyThe chokeic I am researching is very broad, and varies very oftentimes form place to place. The role of citizen journalist is still developing and maturing. The public are only now fully realising the effects of independent reporting. There is also a psychological place that is constantly changing People are only now branch to trust articles that do not come from the large news corporations. explore questions and hypothesisI need to inspect public broadcasting standards, and atten d to what mechanisms are in place to stop the news of larger corporations act completely into infotainment. I need to find out how much larger news corporations trust on spin departments and press offices for their information, and how much investigation is carried out independently.At the moment people rely on news corporations for objective news, and tend to read the work of citizen journalist for a second base opinion. My hypothesis is that all of this will eventually invert, and the only form of open and detailed reporting will actually be that of citizen journalist.Definition of disclose destinationsIn order to understand this essay, the definition of the term citizen journalist must be clarified. There has been much debate over this topic, and much confusion has ensued.The Internet is the most effective medium through which the public can dynamically post comments, leave opinions after news stories and tactile property a direct level of interactivity with their news. opus it would seem that this would lead to hooliganism, sites such as Wikipedia have demonstrated that there are arrangings effective at minimising this sort of excitant, and I will examine this in greater detail later.But the dexterity to simply broadcast opinion isnt, nor has it ever been journalism. Audiences have always been harnessed into the process of news making, whether the input may be in the form of letters to the editor or a clip of video phone footage. Despite the fact that during the 7/7 London bombings contributed video footage was used, public contributions have always been lively to journalists.It is easy to forget that when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, Abraham Zapruder, a instalment of the public who got the best shot of the assassination, shot the video footage seen across the globe. It was his film that was used by analysts to try and determine from where the president was assassinated.But recently the public have been recruited into the new s making process at a much greater level. People are intrigued by people, and want to visualize the experiences of others, to humanize their news stories. Editors and producers embed stories and experience from members of the public into news stories to put them a more personal dimension. This is the citizen as an addition to a news story.At a greater level of inter sue, citizens can help report in a participatory manner, whereby they contribute to a story in the field of their expertise. Their knowledge or guidance is framed within the journalists scene. The ability to publish a soft draft of a story on the Internet has do it easier for journalists to gain help from the public to aid a story.Citizen Journalists are too often mistaken for eyewitnesses fit with new technology. In wake of the 7/7 bombings, people are quick to label the footage and pictures submitted by members of the public as the work of citizen journalist. But I believe citizen journalism entails the bypassing of the commercial news system completely.This is the only way for reporting to not contain the agenda of a large corporation. It can be argued that reporting can never be truly devoid of a personal agenda, but a corporation will inevitably be entwined in a political agenda.Citizen Journalist is a term used to divulge the actions of novices taking it upon themselves to report on subjects in an accurate, and independent manner. It is not to be confused with participatory journalism, where the public are used as sources.Another germane(predicate) term is Infotainment, which is essentially a slang term used to describe information given the slant of entertainment.A summary of what is to followI am going to assess the liberation technological advance has made for citizen journalist, including beneficial and detrimental effects on news product as a whole. I want to see whether there is get on for both master key and citizen journalists and whether traditional reporters are a dying s pecies. use case studies I am going to analyse where stories written by citizen journalist may not have been possible in a larger, bodied journalistic scene, and similarly, where reporting would not be possible without the resources functional to a larger news corporation. As well as this I am going to analyse the trends of incarnate news, and asses whether the very roles of citizen journalist and news by larger corporations will invert with serious stories being written by the citizen journalist while corporate news is almost only if reduced to infotainment.Literature reviewThis topic is pertinent because it affects all of the information we receive. The forces of supply and demand work heavily on the corporate news system, and as such are debasing the level of our news. Citizen journalist on the other hand, is relatively free from such forces, and more able to keep open for niche audiences. There is a new freedom to write passionately about non-mainstream topics, with the possibility of a worldwide audience.When newspapers first came into circulation, in fifteenth century German and Flemish states, they lacked the same institutionalized nature that they do today. It was the dawn of the industrial revolution and the creation of large cities, the cheapening costs abstruse in mass printing and the growth of literacy rates provided the market for newspapers in the nineteenth century. Then advertisers realized the true potential for marketing to an ever growing population of newspaper readers, and the costs of newspapers went down even further.The corporate nonplus first took over the Hollywood film industry in 1914, and then the movie distribution system. By 1920 radio had become corporate, and by 1950s television had followed suit. All forms of media were organized in accordance with corporate industrial logic.Government controlled media started to arise in many part of less developed countries. In Africa and Asia, where power had been handed over to those whom the departing compound powers were most comfortable with dealing with. These people were clones of the ruling elite who had once colonised them. Hence the newly emerging media were staffed by the most Westernised natives. The New World Information Order (NWIO) was created to justify development journalism.The ethos of the agreement encouraged state control of the media in order to educate and develop the respective local populations, and in within this line of thinking the grooming system in developing countries was also shifted into the state run sphere. As Louw points out, Communist control of the media was justified through the same line of argument.In Afro-Asia education and development were managerial tools by which ruling elites (forcibly?) Westernised their populations, thereby increasing the numbers of their own Western tribe. (p.43)One of the most relevant aspects of the Internet, is the creation of an accessible worldwide community that endangers such polit ical mechanisms of control. While once peoples perceptions of life itself were very much narrowed by the culture in which they lived, now people from all over the world have an interface with which they can communicate.The internet has evolved third world countries, with their antiquated and even non existent phone lines missed out on the first generation of the internet. But as technology developed, fibre opthalmic lines and broadband supervene upond the traditional ways of plugging in, and third-world countries, with no existing infrastructure to replace and facilitated with cheap labour costs, have quickly connected themselves in.The fluid phone revolution was similar Five years ago in India if you cute to make an International call you had to call an operator and book it in. You would then wait by the phone for an hour or two, and at some point the operator would call you back and connect you. Now every Indian with a roof over their head also has a mobile. This is an unbeliev able phenomenon in a country which frequently still has power cuts, is home to immense poverty and still has a massively treacherous wired phone network. Despite this the prevalence of a mass mobile phone culture took place there even before America had abandoned their two-way.Having come from an Indian background, and with all of my family currently residing there including my fifteen-year-old sister, I have visited the country at least once a year for the last twenty years. I am persistently surprised by the massive changes that occur there from one year to the next, but these are factors relating to matters of economy and fiscal development. The most prominent changes have occurred, in my opinion, since the Internet and the mass availability of American cable channels.The standardization of social determine simply through watching American cable television is enormous, and the encounter on the younger generation is massive when in contrast to their parents. An issue, which is widely ignored in more developed western countries, is the dominance of their media passim the world, and the lack of correspondence between them and local cultures. The birth of citizen journalist has authorise countless people in less developed countries.But spatial boundaries have been eroded by technology, distance has been tamed and while news once took months or even years to travel, today it travels in the scintillate of an eye. Because of this the relevance of political borders, and the concept of culture and country has become more peripheral. The importance of the citizen as a reporter, the value of hyper-local news and the democratic nature of the internet as tool for expression is quickly becoming invaluable.In part due to these matters authoritarian states such as China, Cuba and Iran have been constrained into moving away from their isolation, both ideologically and culturally, and individuals are privy to the make-up of journalists not within the borders of their own, controlled domains.Monroe Price asked the question Can a nation state survive in a world in which the boundaries of culture, conviction and imagination do not (1995 236). Nation states have survived and, McNair argues in cultural Chaos, they will continue to do so. He argues that they will grow into conflict nation states with conflicting ideologies.A brief account of the issues relevant to the topicThe creation of a press department in any company or political organization is a key factor. Journalists rely more and more n the information fed to them by the very people they are trying to write about.*EXPANDWhat is clear is that there will always be some individuals or groups trying to control meaning. Underpinning this is a competition over resources (material, cultural and status). Our life chances are deposit by the social parameters facilitating or hindering our access to such resources (p25 The Media and heathenish Production Eric Louw, 2001)Technological advances hav e resulted in a massive, global, spatial dissolution, and are becoming more and more relevant to our lives. This enablement of social realization through geographical space is a concept being dissolved through the advancement of technology. Technology affects the way we write, the footage we can capture to accompany our stories, and our ability to access the news itself. It is the advancement of technology which has enable the creation of a citizen journalist in the first place.The world is getting smaller, and the amelioration of communicatory potential is bringing human beings closer together. Since the 1980s, and more specifically with the barrage of live news coverage that CNN brought to the Gulf War in 1991, a new sense of immediacy has been brought to the news.There is a new sense of participation, and interactivity that has been brought to broadcasting and the news in general, with broadcasts becoming more dynamic. We can be transported from the isolation of our domestic env ironments to the parochialism of the news environment we are watching.Through news exposure, which includes the horror of human catastrophe, society is becoming more and more disengaged with the context of what it witnesses. People dont have enough time between major world events to become fully acquainted with the context of any particular situation. Broadcasters would rather keep viewers engaged with sensational footage, than guess loosing audiences with a contextual background which could be deemed more boring.As a result people feel that there are too many events to care about any at all, and more significantly there is a widespread concern that we are essentially incapacitated to do anything about it. Our press has the freedom to fully articulate the injustices of today, but tomorrow there will be new injustices.When the format of the news we are subject to is too consistent and perpetual to never calculate not to be shocked by a front page or a top story on a everyday basi s, we have no choice other than to be emotionally indifferent. McNair describes us as having become fatigued by the proximity of human woe (pg 7, Cultural Chaos). The News corporations, governed by the same principles of supply and demand as any other capitalist institutions, have advertency converted our round the clock news coverage into a form of entertainmentof infotainment.One of the primary book I am going to come along at is We the Media Grassroots journalism, by the people, for the people, by Dan Gillmore. We the Media inspects the blogging phenomenon, and more specifically analyses the relationship between the readers and creators of news.Gillmor acknowledges that blogging is still in an early stage of development, and that in many respects professional journalists are not only cigaret the developments occurring in news production, but struggling to keep up. He goes on to argue that institutionalized journalism needs a new model of conduct in order to be in a seat to fi ght the good fights.I have also been looking at Cultural Chaos Journalism, news and power in a globalised world by Brian McNair. He draws on examples from the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the London Underground bombings to examine the relationship between journalism and power in the digital age. McNair explores the geographic and cultural breakdown-taking place as provoked by the digital age. He examines the impact of the digital age on journalism the effects it has in creating a global culture.There is a dismay among news media professionals that the rise of citizen journalist will eclipse the role of the professional journalist. The biggest, and most universal fear is a public reliance on the information provided by citizen journalist will lack the accuracy and objectiveness of the larger corporation.Citizen journalists on the other hand feel that the professional media lack the passion or the flexibility to report as accurately or incisively as the m. One of the advantages of citizen journalism is that the massive number of amateur writers overshadows the comparatively small number of professional journalists. When people can claim what to write about, it is guaranteed that they will do so with passion. Their articles will be researched it can be argued, with greater dedication. Citizen journalist are ruled by no sense of hierarchy as a group citizen journalist can use a skill set appropriate to a project.However, a journalist is merely meant to be a vehicle through which to pay back a message. Will this influx of citizen journalism actually diminish objectivity? At least with the mainstream media the public can have an understanding of the context of the paper in which thy read their article. When a different writer, writes every article with no editor to moderate output, can we ever have an understanding of the standpoint of the writer, with no prior knowledge of him or her. On top of this, we cant even count on a set of d efining, professional journalistic principles, nor will amateur writer sever have access to the resources of a professional department.Case StudyOn Sunday, April sixth there was an article in the New York Times Observer about an undercover vegan, who set out to expose the horrific conditions of a southeastern California slaughterhouse. To fit in he bought sandwiches made from soy riblets and ate them in a dusty car parking lot with the other workers.Despite his vegan beliefs, this citizen journalist spent long days escorting cows to the kill. gird with a buttonhole camera, he made sure he was successful in recording images of workers flipping sick dairy cows with forklifts, prodding them with electric charges and dragging them by their legs with chains so that they could be processed into ground meat. The investigation resulted in the United States authorities taking action at a national level.The film the citizen made was picked up by the mainstream media, and was effective becau se it was edited in a sensationistically limited manner. Citizen journalism is efficacious because it allows smaller groups of people to be heard, and the more empowered we become by technological advances, the easier it becomes for us to challenge the images we are exposed to by the mainstream media.