Is it Time to Kill “Citizen Journalism”?

Mark Evans has the following to say about Citizen Journalism. This term has been bandied about quite a lot, but in reality I think we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg in participatory media. At Canoe and Sun Media we have been experimenting with these ideas for about a year now, and have some intitiatives in the works that will have a significant impact on the way we think about content generation. Over to you Mark:

I was on a panel this morning about “Citizen Journalism” at the ICE conference in Toronto. One of the most interesting topics is whether “citizen journalism” is a credible and/or accurate way to describe the activity of people who are not, in fact, journalists. Are these people “correspondents” or “stringers” or “reporters”? And does it really matter?

At the end of the day, the “citizen journalism” story is really about the willingness of people to share their what they see through vehicles such as blogs, podcasts or Web sites such as NowPublic and Orato. Michael Tippett, NowPublic’s co-founder, described the “citizen journalism” debate as “pedantic” and as useful as arguing how many angels fit on a pin. He also mentioned that NowPublic doesn;t use “citizen journalism” even though it’s widely seen as a leading “citizen journalism” site.

It may be that “citizen journalism” will continue to be used because it’s an easy – and perhaps catchy – way to describe a fascinating phenomena where the publisher is the audience and the audience is the publisher. (Much like people like to use Web 2.0 to encapsulate all the new services being developed these days). However you want to describe it, it is changing the world and business of journalism, which is the most important issue.

Update: Joe Thornley has a summary of the panel

Source: Is it Time to Kill “Citizen Journalism”?
Originally published on Thu, 22 Mar 2007 14:04:04 GMT by Mark Evans