Citizen journalism

1.What is citizen journalism?

This question could not have one right answer because this question depends on whom you ask. You are likely to get very different answers from different people. Some have called it networked journalism, open source journalism, and citizen media. Communication has changed greatly with the advent of the Internet. The basic meaning is posting news or advise on Internet sites with out professional training. Most of the times what you can put on is restricted.

http://www.purdafash.com/ this website enables everyone to post up news and also solve peoples problems.

http://www.cnn.com/ireport/ this website shows some examples of people citizen journalism

2. How can you become a citizen journalist? What tools do you need? How do you communicate? Who will read/view your story/images? Can you make money out of this??

Citizen journalism is such an easy job that any one that has a journaling hobby could do. All you need is a journalism hobby and a good sense of photography because you need to collect pictures and put your news. The tools a person needs is the Internet and that's basically everything. The good thing about citizen journalism is that a person does not have to study journalism for five years or go to trainings. Communicating is a very easy in this situation because the Internet is involved but sometimes it is hard to know or connect some people but in most cases it is fairly easy to communicate. Lots of people view or read those images and story's since it is on the world wide web them any one that is interested in it would view you image or story. A person could not make money from citizen journalism because the story or image is public it is not tagged to a specific person but in some sites it is and if one famous journalist notices it he could contact you.unfortunately there is a low possibility of this happening. In some countries like France citizen journalism is banned because of the violence caused but it.

3.What are the issues to do with citizen journalism?

Most people think that citizen journalism is a very serious issue and people could have a career of it but not any more the interest in people having citizen journalism as a career is vary limited. those days people post stories and images to raise awareness in there communities and very few consider it as a career. Another issue is the invasion of people's privacy. In some cases people are invading other people's privacy that is not the right thing to that's why in some countries citizen journalism is banned. Some countries consider citizen journalism as invading people's privacy and some think it is not. Lots of people agree that everything should go online as it happens in fact every body thinks that but yet again there are some minorities that disagree with this issue. i think that everything should go online as it happens to update people with the newest stories going at the moment.

This picture is taken by a person which is apparently a member of the iReport committee. As severe weather hit the Midwest, iReporters captured amazing photos and videos. This is a very good example of citizen journalism because the picture is taken by a normal person at the time not by a journalist. This picture shows a thunder storm in the Midwest.