Citizen Journalism

I took a look at an article on Poynter Online by Steve Outing about citizen journalism. He brings different steps for incorporating this new trend into the newsroom. It sort of goes from very conservative exposure to a complete merging with the professional world. For example, going from allowing comments by readers to a stand-alone site with up to 70 percent of the content reported by everyday people.

One of the last "layers" of incorporating citizen journalism into the newsroom is publishing both professional and citizen reports side-by-side. So if there was a story about a murder that occured in a neighborhood a reporter would cover the beat but then another story would be written by a person that lived in the neighborhood themselves. The way that I interpret this is that it is like a quote from one of the neighbors but times a thousand. It gives the reader a full understanding of what happened through several lenses.

I like this. Offering different perspectives is always a great thing and how can we be serving the public if we do not do everything possible to give them every angle uncensored? The only thing that uneases me is when I think about how accountable and accurate citizen journalism really is. Also, if the population gets involved does it mean we are all out of jobs? Perhaps it is selfish to a certain extent but it should be a concern for the future of a career in this field, and I don't think anyone can answer that question at the moment with absolute certainty. I just hope that at some point the bar is raised for the professional journalist in order to maintain a career of it.