Citizen Journalism

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Citizen journalism and professional journalism

Introduction

Brandon Stanton is the founder and photographer of the blog Humans of New York (Stanton, 2010). Brandon initially started with taking pictures of regular New Yorkers and posted their pictures with a story about their life or an experience they had on his blog. However recently Brandon is situated at places in Europe where mainly refugees from Syria are arriving. He asked the Syrian refugees about their life and journey and posted the photo and story on his blog. Soon the stories and pictures of these Syrian refugees were shared on Facebook and the entire world could read the stories of hundreds of Syrian refugees. Brandon depicted the refugees not in statistics or as problems but …show more content…

These sources however do not provide them with information on ‘’real people’’. Professional journalists have difficulty finding and involving regular citizens as sources to recruit information. The positive effect of citizen journalism on professional journalism in this case is that the citizen journalists can function as deliverers of ‘’real people’’ namely the people the citizen journalists use as sources themselves. These people would be trusted local …show more content…

They cannot use citizen journalists anymore for their exclusive insight information on disaster scenes if they do not give the citizen journalists the credits they deserve (Holt & Karlsson, 2014).
Furthermore, Wall (2015) also mentions another positive effect namely that the news which is not reported by professional journalists, such as news from local communities, is covered by citizen journalists. This is a positive effect because professional journalists do not have to cover every occurrence by themselves.
Lastly, Allan and Peters (2015) mention that professional journalists can receive information of a certain scene without actually being there. They can cooperate with the citizen journalists to obtain the facts concerning the scene and edit it according to the correct context or expand the information on the scene with explanations by experts. The result of this cooperation will be an expansion of the information revealed to the citizens.

The negative effects of citizen journalism on professional

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