Journalism School of Everyday Life

This kind of journalism that involves the average citizens in the role of capturing and analyzing the news, and delivering them in their own words, has a long history in the United States. First of all we have to go back in time, when the news were only analyzed by professional people that had the prestige and capabilities to do that work correctly. Also, the audience of those times was very conservative and belonged to the final part of the “media chain” (they were the final part because they were the ones who received the information after it had gone through a process). They wanted their news coming from people who were experts in the media field, and could perform a good job at the time of analyzing news.

Thanks to the quick and great advance in technology, now everyone has a camera, laptop, internet and everything needed on their cell phones, so that they are capable of capturing any kind of information and transforming it into news. Besides, in this times the people want to express their point of view on everything that happens (this is the opposite of the silent generation), and they have the tools to do it at any time or moment they want to. Now thanks to all that, people are starting to create their own spaces to express the news adding their personal opinion, and this can be on the radio, internet, television etc.

"Doing citizen journalism right, means crafting a crew of correspondents who are typically excluded from or misrepresented by local television news: low-income women, minorities and youth, the very demographic and lifestyle groups who have little access to the media and that advertisers don't want," says Robert Huesca, an associate professor of communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. I totally agree on this because who is more capable of communicating the news than the same people who live were the action occurs, that can show us the real suffering and essence of what is a historical event.

While for some people citizen journalism is a blessing, for others is a curse, one of the biggest oppositions to this type of journalism is the newspaper New York Times. They say that the public journalism abandons the traditional objectivity of the news. In my opinion it is a good way of expressing your point of view in a healthy way, if you don’t offend anyone and say what you think about a fact, it’s correct, but if you begin to use the media for bad purposes, then it’s wrong to use it and the professional journalists have the right to protest against this kind of journalism. I can understand that what makes some journalists angry is that they spend a lot of time and effort preparing themselves for this job, trying to deliver the best they have to people, but then someone with no experience what so ever pretends to know how to report a news. I think we should establish some limits to citizen journalism as well as to professional journalism.

Here is a very interesting video explaining in a few words what citizen journalism is: