IS CITIZEN JOURNALISM A THREAT TO TRADITIONAL/PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISM?
The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create argument or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others. In light of this, journalists are not that threatened by citizen journalism because citizens are not paid to report news.
Furthermore when people read news on facebook or twitter and somehow do not understand or believe them, they buy a newspaper or get an online publication to confirm and that keeps the readability high and journalists are not threatened. Citizen journalism has been there for years and I do not see any bad influence to journalists. Citizens also have the right to be part of the daily news so it is also a stepping stone for them.
Citizens are the source of information therefore they should form pass and parcel of the news circulation. This allows citizens to feel more involved in the community by expressing their opinions, engaging without their social media users and contributing their thoughts and knowledge about a subject. The first thing you do when you see some sort of controversy is to grab your camera, take a picture or video or pull out your cell phone and post a comment on Twitter or Facebook.
Citizen journalism has become significant because it can report news temporarily while the newspaper agencies are recovering from a hack attack. Citizen journalists can quite often be in places where professional journalists cannot get to or may not have access to. For example, a third world country having a natural disaster where all access is cut off, the citizen journalist can report right from the scene. Citizen journalism is important as it lends a helping hand to professional journalists.
In other words, citizen journalism often celebrates the positive aspects of a society which of course rarely appear on traditional, national media. At the risk of praising "good news journalism", I do think this is a significant and pleasing difference between top-down "professional" journalism and bottom-up "amateur" journalism. It does not put journalists at risk, but in some ways it assists them.
From my point of view, I do not believe that citizen journalism is real journalism, I just take it as a piece or source of information because citizens that write are not professionals nor do they have qualifications, so journalists should not be threatened by it. The question of whether citizen journalism is considered real journalism is still up for debate. Some may argue that only paid journalists working for traditional news outlets like newspapers and magazines are legitimate. But most bloggers contend they aren't interested in replacing the professionals, and don't even consider themselves journalists.
