Citizen Journalism Case Study

Is it Worth the Risk?

Both Jamal Albarghouti and Eddie Ho just happened to be in the right place at the right time to become citizen journalists, with their cell phones in hand, giving them the opportunity to record a media worthy event while it was taking place. They are not professional reporters, just two young men who knew they were witnessing terrifying events that news media outlets would be interested in seeing from a first person perspective. Accordingly, did their actions endanger others or were they endangered, if so, was it worth the risk that Albarghouti and Ho took to record these events?

For sure this was a frightening event experience for these two young men. Jamal Albarghouti who is Palestinian, found himself in a position to

Furthermore, it is evident that every journalist has a different concept of danger and what is hazardous to one person may not be considered hazardous to another. The individual desire to record human tragedy also differs from person to person (9). According to Gabe Mythen, the attraction of citizen journalist to media internet sites is that, “For technophiles, a substantial increase in peer-to-peer interactions has eroded gate-keeping hierarchies as public-based social news sites that set their own topics and agendas. Thus, one of the vaunted distinctions drawn between citizen journalism and professional journalism is that ‘no editor comes between the author and the reader” (Mythen,

So when he heard gunshots on the Virginia Tech campus he knew without a doubt, that a news media event was taking place (Washington Post). By the same token, in the United States, we do not have the same associated risks of recording police circumstances such as those in other countries. Whereas, the possibility of recording government genocide of a people has been often a daily occurrence and the personal risk of injury or death is heightened. As a result, without citizen journalist the world might not know the extent or severity of a catastrophic event such as the Indonesian tsunami or of the government genocide of its people in Middle Eastern countries like Syria. Hence, the technological world is a much smaller place with the ability to share news events in a matter of moments. Therefore, for many who live in war torn countries, know it is worth the risk to inform the world of their government’s atrocities, the personal tragedies of its people. For instance, I can only think back to the years prior to World War II, and had the world known sooner of the genocide taking place in Germany, surely world nations would have intervened sooner had there been citizen journalist posting pictures on the internet of Jews and other non desired people (according to the Nazis), being cordoned off in