IS CITIZEN JOURNALISM A THREAT OR CHALLENGE TO PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISM?

Citizen journalism known in some circles as participatory journalism is the act whereby ordinary members of the public play an active role in the processes of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information.

With this new trend in the journalism profession, the public who usually are on the receiving end of the media channel perform a role not only in gathering news and information but also in its publication or broadcast. It is not difficult to establish how citizen journalism started but it is clear that information and communication technology (ICT) has given rise to this new way of practicing journalism not by trained or professional journalists but by ordinary folks who record news events and activities as they occur and passed them on to media houses for broadcast.

In fact media houses encourage the public not only to film or capture news events as they happen but also pass it on to their outlets for either for broadcast or publication. That as a result turns the ordinary man who is capturing the news, not necessarily a certified journalist into a journalist of some sort.

Citizen journalism would have posed no threat to professional journalism since with both forms of journalism news and information are passed on to an audience for consumption at the end of the day. The threat arises however in areas where citizen journalism ignores simple journalistic principles of ensuring balance, truth, objectivity and fairness not forgetting the need to avoid sensationalism which only succeeds sometimes in giving even bare facts too much coloration.

Professional journalism mostly makes strenuous efforts to play the two sides of a story therefore allowing the public to make their judgments on stories. With citizen journalism, however, stories are often slanted to one side by the common man (the untrained citizen journalist) who might have had the chance of witnessing a breaking news event and thus make it available for press.

He makes no effort to ensure the veracity of a story. He strives not for balance and this is all because he may not appreciate the need for that because he lacks basic journalism training. The core values of real journalism are thus sacrificed on that platform cheaply eventually threatening effective and good journalism.

So in conclusion, it is true that one good thing citizen journalism does is to make the public part of the news reporting but given the fact that members of the public and citizen journalists for that matter may not stick to the dictates of the professionalism journalism, it is fair to conclude that though citizen journalism has its positives it has an inherent danger for professional journalism