Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Citizen Journalistic Blogging

With the advanced of internet nowadays, it seems so easy to publish information on the Internet. People using the social power of the internet to communicate with their own and the outside world (Funnell 2010). Today, the World Wide Web (WWW) is at its height of evolution, Blogs are all over the Internet. Blogging and citizen journalism have become an active and important role in the delivery of news, leading to a debate that everyone can actually be a journalist. This, it is not surprising that many blogs are being used for journalism purpose. 
Lasica (2007) defined citizen journalism as the act of people or citizens assuming the role of a journalist in gathering, investigating and dissemination information as truthful as possible through weblogs.
Common journalistic tool: Camera and handphones.
(Source: IDTM 2010)
According to Lasica (2007), personal gadgets such as camera, mobile phones and recorders can be use to collect the sufficient information by taking images and recording the videos the audios to support the information.
Blogs as the independent news for the public:
According to Papacharissi (cited in Tremayne 2007, p.21), "blogs offer a real space where information that do not allow to publish in mainstream media can be published". Same as the mainstream media, weblogs have some publishing rules that need to followed such as defermation law (Lee 2007). However, compared to the mainstream media, weblogs do not have an editor or gatekeeper to fliter the news. Thus, bloggers are freely to express their own feelings or write out the true story of a news that being hiden by the mainstream median without worrying that their news will be filtered . It is important to let the people in the country to actually voice up their opinion, rather than always filtered through others' perceptions and biases (Loewenstein 2010). Besides that, people are more likely to seek information online as in weblogs, information is presented in many different modes, combining text with images, sound effects, animation and hyperlinks that will easily grab the audience attention compared to the normal print media (Walsh 2006). According to Walsh (2006), multimodal text is where the words are complemented by pictures and other modes help to make the readers understand more towards a topic. 
In additions, blogs as a independent news site are important to let the mainstream media know that audiences are not passive absorbers of information. Audiences do have the rights to know the whole true story. According to Tremayne (2007), not all of the information provided from the mainstream media are not fully accurate as due to the censorship or the confidential to certain bodies of power such as the government. The existing of the citizen journalistic blogs provides the public with two-sided perspective in a story. The mainstream media's view and the other extra view from the outsiders help to satisfied the needs of the readers (Lannon 2006).
Can journalistic blogs be trusted?
The credibility of citizen journalistic blogs has always been an issue as there are more and more citizen journalism in the country. The credibility of information in these blogs always been questioned as the writer are mostly just a normal citizen and not a professional journalism. Their news might be filtered by their own perception or biased opinions. 
To solve this problem, Independent news sites, OhMyNews. com in South Korea has come out with an online community of journalistic editors to check and confirm the credibility of the news written by the normal citizens before they publish online (Glaser 2004).As Lannon (2006) once said, credibility and accuracy of the information is very important in a useful website. Thus, bloggers have to make sure that all the information provided on their blogs are true and accurate.


References:
Posted by Joanne Choo at 2:22 AM

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