Citizen Journalism

The term 'Citizen Journalism' was first coined by Stuart Allan in 2006 in his book 'Online News: Journalism and the Internet'. Citizen journalism is the connection, dissemination and analysis of news and information by the general public, especially be means of the internet. With the rise in social media over the past years, citizen journalism has become a part of how we view news stories. Often, major news outlets will now use citizen's videos and photographs within one of their stories. The benefits of this is that citizens may be at the scene of an event there and then, whereas news outlets cannot predict and arrive at events that will happen. We have definitely seen a rise in citizen journalism because of advances in technology; most people have a smartphone now, with the capability to take high quality photographs and moving image.

As an example, I have researched a recent BBC news story of the 2015 Hong Kong marathon. The marathon has been dubbed 'monotonous' and 'boring', as the article states the course is made up of a 31 mile (50km) stretch, but of the same road, 25 times. Although the course is small, the organisers state that it is still quite a feat for central Hong Kong, where space is limited. After searching the hashtag #HongKongMarathon on twitter, I was easily able to find examples of citizen journalism.

The advantage of citizen's own photographs such as this one, is that they often give an insider or realistic view of an event. News outlets can often misinterpret, or even change news stories to suit their audience, whereas an example of a citizen's photograph here, is an unedited, unbiased picture of the real event. Below, we can see a travel campaign (discover Hong Kong) and how it presents the marathon in a very different way, using a posed, stylised photograph. This is a perfect example of how citizen journalism photographs can differ from media outlet photographs.