Hey all! its Citizen Journalism Week here. The presenters built up a suitable presentation both to combat and confirm the theory that citizen journalism is beneficial to us journalists out there.
Citizen Journalism, as my experience tells us, is fast growing due to the technology advances that our society is making today. As one of the presenters did put it, that Australia has not really set the wheels in motion for citizen journalism. However, I can mention the 2 places where citizen journalism is blossoming, USA and Singapore.
For USA, it is a haven for citizen journalism, probably because of the First Amendment. CNN has a citizen journalism site called iReport. I believe that in USA, there is many things going on in many different countries, and to some people, they believe that certain news should not be limited to their local news reporters, but deserve to be broadcast nationally, or even worldwide. However, on the iReport website, many of the videos that are 24 hours old have only on average 400 views, besides one incident where a oil pipeline burst in Iowa, which garnered 110,000 views.
For Singapore, the reason why citizen journalism is making such a huge wave here is because of the media industry. Singapore has only a solitary player within the media industry, and it is the government. Although it is made up by two companies (MediaCorp, Singapore Press Holdings), the government has a majority share in each of them. Singapore, in previous times, has moved to struck down any possible comments that may have deviated from the "Singapore" theme. Racist comments on blogs have provoked indictments from the government. Anti-political themes in website, blogs, and news reports given by anti-governmental protestors highlighting their rallies have been taken down or struck off the Internet. Foreign journals such as the Far East Economic Review have been awarded fines because of their material which is against the government here in Singapore. There are so many different examples that I can post, but we get the picture.
However, the government is not catching up with technology, as there are too many different blog sites to screen through, and as a result, there are many new websites and blogs that you would never be able to see 5 years ago. In response, the government did put up a few websites to aid citizen journalism their way, namely STOMP, and RazorTV, both of which has not really taken off yet, with each video gaining only approximately 500 views. Only the videos featured in the newspapers itself gain slightly more coverage. Otherwise, the many videos people post up are of girlfriends kicking her guy's crotch in public, unacceptable behaviour in public trains, and so on, which has nothing to do with real news I suppose. Established bloggers like Xiaxue and mr.brown garner almost 20,000 hits a day. Some of there bloggers like the above mentioned have also received endorsement deals to put on their website.
It is obvious that I have a lot more to say for Singapore because I have lived there my whole life. However, my opinion regarding citizen journalism is that it needs to have boundaries, although it may be tough to do so. if there is no regulations, especially in Singapore, where racial harmony is paramount, this harmony may fall apart because of a few people who do not think before they post.
Joel
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