Yahoo is on a buying spree. Who can blame them, it’s a company with an identity crisis (heck, they can’t even chose between being a media and technology company). In a bid to ‘improve user content’, yahoo recently hired Katie Couric, for a mouth opening $6,000,000 a year.

Brian Solis, a principal analyst with Altimeter Group who has worked with Couric said, the deal ‘will give Yahoo more premium content with a big name attached, which it can convince advertisers to sell ads against.’
What a waste! …Maybe not, Time will tell…

For me, the 2013 protests in turkey is enough to dismiss such a frivolous waste of precious resources. During the protests, the main stream Turkish media failed to cover the grievances of the citizens. As Turks were being blasted in the face with tear gas, CNN Turk aired a show about penguins. The results was a blast of tweets that brought world attention to the event.

Let’s take the recent passing away of Nelson Mandela for example. Users were tweeting about Mandela at a rate of around 80 tweets per minute on the top hash tag alone!!! That’s enough to get word out.

With such information available, why hire for such a huge sum, when user generated content is the next big thing? I’m not a professional analyst, but with the writing on the wall, I’m betting that citizen journalism is the way forward.

For one, citizen journalism is virtually costless. No need to pay millions of dollars to journalists. Heck, medium.com doesn’t pay me, however it’s built so well that I write on it for the fun of it.

Secondly, with the ubiquity of the internet, mobile devices and social networks, someone will take this up if the mainstream media fails to do so. As a young entrepreneur and founder of LoveRealm for example, we are working on a user generated content site that allows users to produce quality content about their Christian life. This is soon going to take over the world.

Look, main stream journalists are not God! They can’t be everywhere, however empowering users with the right tools will lead to, timely and surprisingly accurate reports on world issues. The writing is on the wall. User generated content is the next big thing. This is why I believe in medium.com, and our next startup.