Journalism has seen huge changes over recent years as it comes in all formats and from a variety of places. Live tweets from disaster zones is the first one to spring to mind, as live updates are telling the story of what’s happening on the ground. .
Live updates from the Haiti earthquake where some of the first type of citizen journalism episodes to spring to mind , along with the live tweets of locals wondering what’s the hell was happening in the town of Abbottabad, Pakistan on the night of the raid on Osama bin laden compound.
These updates are priceless and captured the moment of the event in real-time. Imagine the citizen journalism updates from the twin towers disaster , some however might argue this could have caused people not to leave the scene as quick and in turn could have resulted in more deaths. There certainly would be a ton more evidence of the disaster available today.
A range of issues also exist with this type of journalism, such examples include terrorists use the platform to promote their killings on-line. There appears to be no way of stopping the uploading of these barbaric killings,as they spread across millions of social media platforms in seconds without any consideration given to victims families. Like previous generations, these acts required terrorist groups to use mainstream media.
This topic also makes me wonder, how the I.R.A. would have used this type of journalism? RTE played a huge role on bringing the I.R.A peacefire to a reality, as the acted as an intermediary between themselves and the governments of the day. It makes me wonder would RTE have played such a major role if citizen journalism was part of media back then!!
Goals been recorded in stadiums and then uploaded to social media platforms within seconds is commonplace, so who needs Sky Sports!! Maybe I’ll just unsubscribe from Sky Sports altogether however these type of practices has the premier league worried about future television contracts. http://rs21.org.uk/2014/09/17/premier-league-crackdown/.
Ultimately I do feel that this type of media is of great benefit to myself when I’m out and about. At least now it saving me a few quid on not having to buy the star every morning. Nowadays one has the luxury of following certain tweeters on-line that are constantly updating how events are progressing in real time. Boxing as an example has certain popular citizen journalists of whom I follow on twitter, for the reason that they will are normally be in attendance at big fight nights and can keep me updated regularly on how bouts are been contested throughout the night.
Overall I feel citizen journalism is a positive but there will always be some people not reporting truthful and verified information, some would say “sure ain’t mainstream journalism full of bullshit too”.
