Impact Of Mass Democratization Of Journalism And Corporate Media

Democratization of Journalism and Corporate Media: An analytic comparative essay

Due to plummeting price and better accessibility of technologies similar to cell phones and the internet, the access to information and sharing has become cheaper and easier. The decentralized nature of these technologies has helped give rise to citizen journalism where audiences collect, analyze and disseminate news information usually primarily through the internet. Since citizen journalism is decentralized, the media content cannot be regulated. This means the content reported will not always be valid and there is always a risk of false reporting. In addition, the citizen journalists or the “pop up” news activists need the help of mega media corporations such

Also, the audience prefer main sources of news that report stories around the globe rather than dispersed sources of information limited to one geographic area in order to save time and hassle. This means, citizen journalists will not be able to overtake traditional news systems in terms of audience base over a prolonged period of time, preserving the imbalance in power. Both articles show that the traditional media will always be the dominant force over citizen journalism and UGC as the traditional media ultimately decides how and when UGC are used and discussed. This means there will never be mass democratization of journalism and will always be few media outlets that control the flow of information and will have an even stronger audience base compared to the citizen journalists. Anyone with power to collect and share information can be a called a citizen journalist. The decentralized nature of citizen journalism means that there is no central authority present to inspect the validity of information being reported. In the article “Syrian Citizen Journalism”, the authors state an instance

Whether it is through a social media site such as Facebook or a traditional news media such as BBC, citizen journalists always need the help of media corporations in order to be able to share their information and views to the mass audience. According to the article “Syrian Citizen Journalism”, “Syrian citizen journalists took advantage of the built-in networking structure of social media such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc., all of which are key nodes in global information networks.” This quote states that the activists in Syria needed corporate platforms to be able to publish their work and gain attention from the mass audience. This works against the mass democratization of journalism because the citizen journalists must rely on the corporate media for the distribution of their content since an average citizen cannot afford the cost for the infrastructure needed to be able to distribute and broadcast their journalistic content independently. This means, the citizen journalists do not have control over how their content should be distributed, how their content should be framed and what demographic of audience the content should be targeted for. In the article “User-generated content and the news”, the authors discuss the control that the newspapers have over UGC where the newspapers have the ultimate decision on whether they want to publish the information or not