By Kanina Foss
Some have said it's like handing a man off the street a scalpel and authorising him to perform surgery - it blurs the distinction between ordinary people and professionals.
Yet citizen journalism seems to be here to stay.
Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, cellphones, email and blogs (online "diaries" maintained by individuals who post entries displayed in reverse chronological order) have given ordinary people the power to reach mass audiences, resulting in a phenomenon called citizen journalism.
| 'For repressive regimes everywhere, the SMS poses a threat' |
The most famous example of citizen journalism is the video footage captured of the assassination of former US president John F Kennedy.
More recently, citizen journalists have distributed video footage, photos, blog entries and text messages on events such as the Zimbabwean elections, Saturday's bomb blasts in New Delhi and the Beijing Olympics.
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Increasingly, media consumers are becoming media creators, leading to a re-examination of the role of traditional journalists.
"The technology of Web 2.0 (the World Wide Web with added functionality) has not only set new standards for community interaction among people online but is also promising to challenge the definition of journalism as citizens take on the job themselves," says The State of the News Media 2008, an annual report on American journalism.
"Anyone is capable of acts of journalism at any time," Dan Gilmore, director of the Knight Centre for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, said at the recent Highway Africa conference, the largest annual gathering of African journalists.
"In the future there will be thousands of people carrying high-definition recording devices, all connected to high-speed networks. It will be much more likely that a citizen will be there with a phone, than a journalist," Gilmore said.
Despite concerns about credibility (citizens are under no professional obligation to report news using time-honoured journalistic ethics such as accuracy and balance), some say the public is more likely to trust citizen journalists.
According to Pierre Haski, co-founder of a French news website, a poll measuring people's confidence in journalists in France has shown steady declines over the past 20 years, and citizen journalists are more able to connect with audiences.
"People don't trust journalists anymore. Bloggers are able to connect with readers and re-create a link of confidence," he said.
Wits University media studies lecturer Dumisani Moyo said mainstream media was overly market-driven, and citizen journalism was providing respite from its obsession with negativity.
Burkina Faso journalist Cheriff Sy argued that citizen journalism was enabling Africans to break away from the pattern of African news gathered and disseminated by foreign news agencies.
"They don't have the same understanding of our problems. We want to tell our stories with African eyes," he said.
Citizen journalism is said to aid democracy by adding to the plurality of voices. Certainly, in countries operating under repressive regimes, where media censorship prevents mainstream journalists from doing their jobs, citizen journalists are helping the public to participate in discussions and make informed decisions by disseminating information that would otherwise be blocked.
Moyo said a parallel market of information emerged during the March elections in Zimbabwe. The week after the elections, he recorded 500 posts a day from Zimbabwean blogs.
But the largest proportion of alternative news dissemination happened via SMS.
"The most important tool of alternative communication in developing worlds is the SMS. It allows cheap, unrestricted dissemination of information.
"For repressive regimes everywhere, the SMS poses a threat, and is therefore something to be feared and controlled," said Moyo.
- This article was originally published on page 6 of The Star on September 15, 2008
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