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.
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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.
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.
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