The concept of citizen
journalism as against traditional media production cannot be fully discussed
without bringing to bear the meanings of certain terminologies such as citizen
journalism, social media, traditional media and mass media.
John Kelly's Kayaks and
Hidden Gold: The rise, challenges and value of citizen journalism, sees citizen
journalism as "user-generated content". With this term he sought to
define citizen journalism as non-journalists doing the things that
only professional journalists used to do and this encompasses
witnessing, reporting, capturing, writing and disseminating. Hence
non-journalists who do the things that only professional journalists
do are known as citizen journalists per John Kelly's work. Citizen journalists
are also called, grass root journalists, stand-alone journalists, street
journalists among others. Which means everyone is/or can be a citizen
journalists.
Nic Newman in his book -
The rise of new media and its impact on mainstream journalism: September, 2009,
recognizes the fact that social media is an extraordinarily difficult term to
pin down. He argues that at one point the term refers to an activity (a
journalist blogged), it sometimes depicts a software tool (blogger) or a
platform sometimes (you can blog on facebook). He elucidates that, social media is constantly mutating and evolving and that just
when you think you have nailed it, a new combination emerges, changing the
perceptions you have about social media. It is not surprising therefore that
Andrew Fitzgerald on the NewYorkNetwork -New York, termed social media as
"A new digital frontier for story-telling". According to Fitzgerald,
we are in a wide open frontier for creative experimentation where we begin to
explore the vast land of the internet by building new structures on it - the
structures are the new format of story-telling that the internet allow us to
create. Nic Newman's position does not mean we can't coin a term for social
media, Michael Haenlein therefore, defines social media as a group of
internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological
foundations of web 2.0 - allows for the creation and exchange of user-generated
content. Examples of social media includes, Facebook, Twitter,
Blogspot/Blogger, Youtube, Whatsapp, Viber, LinkedIn, Hangouts, Google+,
Wikispaces, Wordpress etc. In other words, any medium that came along with the
advent of the internet is New Media.
Traditional Media also
known as "Legacy Media", on the other hand defines any medium/media
that existed long before the internet. The old means of communication or
expression that have existed since before the new media - Wikipedia. Another
definition from Netlingo a free online dictionary states that: Media that is
considered "old", such as radio, television, and especially
newspapers - With legacy media, the receiver does not contribute or interact
with the content and remains totally "passive".
Mass Media is a
general term use to describe a public communication reaching a large audience.
Per this definition, there isn't much difference between social media and
traditional since they all have the capacity to reach numbers of people. This,
notwithstanding, should not let us lose focus on the things that the
traditional media feels threatened about with respect to the ever growing
popularity of the new media and the activities of citizen journalists. It is
quite clear that the following activities of the new media can pose a great
deal of threat to content production of the traditional media if they don’t
step up their game.
Democratization of
information or the participatory feature of the social media has provided the
stand-alone journalist a new way of breaking news which did not exist prior to
the inception of the new media. Anyone who wants to, can publish a blog or even
tweet to as many people who care to read - It has given the common person the
voice and the opportunity to also contribute to news production which was once
at the preserve of a few privileged individuals (professional journalists). The traditional
media sees this as a threat and have now given the audience an opportunity to
also participate in content production. A typical example is the TV3's
interactive news segment where audience are given the platform to be part of
the news.
Accessibility of
information comes with little or no cost to the street journalist with respect
to social media. Social bookmarking tools and news sites such as Digg,
Delicious, Reddit and countless others make finding specific information,
images and websites increasingly simple by assigning or tagging individual
sites with searchable keywords. The traditional media finds this threating and
in its bid to catch with the pace, have gone online. They have also created
websites where they have published their contents which is accessible to anyone
who visit the site. Examples include, www.myjoyonline.com, www.peacefmonline.com etc.
Infotainment as a key
feature of the social media is an information embedded in entertainment unlike
the hard news formula of the traditional media. This is a bit threatening,
therefore, the traditional media has also devised a way of entertaining its
audience amidst their news bulletin. For instance, the daily graphic in Ghana
make use of cartoons to address certain serious political issues. This makes the
news though serious, interesting at the same time.
Advertising is also one
area where the traditional media feels threatened. The major source of finance
for the legacy media is indisputably advertisement. It now seems that all these
advertisers are all shifting gradually unto the new media, and if care is not
taken this will become a technical knock-out for the traditional media. To
avert this, they should shift more of their advertisement unto their websites,
facebook page and even twitter where a great number of people subscribe to.
To conclude, it is only
prudent to say that as much as the tradition media is threatened by the
activities of the new media, it has also employed some of the features of the
social media to help keep up the dynamism of the new media; after all if you
can’t beat them, you join them.
Reference:
Nic Newman, September, 2009: - The rise of new media and its
impact on mainstream journalism
John Kelly- 2009, Red Kayaks and Hidden Gold: The rise, challenges
and value of citizen journalism, http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cfc9eoao-7c83-497c-a5a7-1b8a85e515d7
Barbara Eber-Schmid- What is new media? – New Media Institute,
http://www.newmedia.org/what-is-new-media.html
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