Citizen Journalism

What is citizen journalism?

• Citizen journalism is the new form public journalism in which any member of the public can publish either images, text, sound or videos onto media web-pages such as the guardian to create a more 'user generated context'. These forms of information can be published as newsto thousands across the web.

What vision of the future did the 'Googlezon' video present?

• 'Googlezon' is a fictional company created from the merging of the two greatest web companies at present, Google and Amazon. It came from the idea of the Google Grid - "a universal platform that provides a functionally limitless amount of storage space and bandwidth to store and share media of all kinds" and Amazons "social recommendation engine" and "huge commercial infrastructure". The idea is that the two will combine to battle with Microsofts 'Newsbotster' in the "News wars of 2010". Through the video it is apparent that 'Googlezon' come triumphant to create EPIC which is a universal, personalized news submission and distribution system that is so popular it effectively puts the fourth estate out of business.

What could be the advantages/disadvantages for us as consumers?

• The idea is that the news published to the individual consumers is relevant to their blog and their personal details, therefore the news they recieve will fit with what they see fit to be important news values and news agendas (advantage).
• This may leave out many headlining. important stories that a high population of the consumers would like to read, for the consumers that have not included terrorism or other important news stories in their personalised blog will not hear of these stories (newspapers will be out of business aswell). If this is not the case and headlining stories are included in everyones personal space, then who is to decide that and who is to decide the headlining stories if it is run digitally and by computers rather than editors etc.

What are the issues for newspapers and journalism?

• With the oncoming digital age, it is evident that fewer jobs are available in certian areas of jounalism, media and newspaper publishing. With the idea of EPIC running the media, issues are created for journalists as their will be no need for newspapers if consumers are getting personalised news from this kind of site. Newspapers will not see the same amount of profits by printing off personalised papers because consumers buy there papers from local stores rather than subscribe, and e-paper is a lot cheaper than paper.