Week 6 Entry

Blogs take many forms including personal diaries, debating areas and educational, like this one. Currently an estimated 27 million blogs exist around the world.

Citizens continue to create blogs and contribute to newspapers in order to compare their opinions on news with readers rather than solely relying on journalists’ views.

The increasing amount of content contributed to newspapers by citizens has raised the issue of whether the content is journalism. The National Union of Journalists has been criticized for labeling citizen journalists as “witness contributors” whose content cannot be classed as journalism.

But what is the difference between user-generated content and citizen journalism? Since the influx of user-generated content from the London bombings the BBC has introduced the User Generated Content (UGC) hub, which sifts through the large amount of content that the BBC’s global audience contributes. The most important step is verifying the authenticity and legality of the content before publishing.

Citizen journalism has introduced a new phenomenon where the public is breaking news stories to the press, rather than the press breaking the news to the public. This will increase as technology makes the world smaller. It imposes great threat to the livelihood of journalism if journalists don’t become innovative in their use of user-generated content.

Related links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58iZpMRclwI

http://publishing2.com/2007/05/22/every-newspaper-journalist-should-start-a-blog/

Citizen journalism in the US: http://www.kcnn.org/research/hartsville_today/

Why journalists should blog: http://www.buzzmachine.com/2006/06/03/blog-or-perish/