Crowdsourcing and citizen journalism are changing the ways of journalism and the ways of how people consume news. The power of mass collaboration and intelligence of Internet technologies leads to plenty of ways for creating news, reporting news and analyzing news. However, the situation that any people have the access to those platforms and become news sources, also leads to a controversy discussion among ethical problems for both professional journalists and citizen journalists.
But first, what is Crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing is defined as “obtain by enlisting the services of a number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via Internet.”
As the figure shows, the usage of the word “crowdsourcing” among millennial has a dramatic increase over time staring 2010. As the Internet technology and portal device techs develop, people have more access to Internet by handful portal devices like smart phone. The distribution of social media platforms provides plenty of ways to easier the process of creating contents and spreading information. Social media platforms provide opportunities to the public to upload contents. The intelligence of crowdsourcing leads to the trend of citizen journalism.
So, what is Citizen Journalism?
The Citizen journalism refers to the collection, dissemination, and analysis of news and information by general public, especially by means of Internet. An American journalism, Courtney C. Radsch, she defines citizen journalism as
“An alternative and activist form of newsgathering and reporting that functions outside mainstream media institutions, often as a response to shortcomings in the professional journalistic field, that uses similar journalistic practices but is driven by different objectives and ideals and relies on alternative sources of legitimacy than traditional or mainstream journalism.”
It means that citizen journalism is based on the public, the public to play a role in the process of collecting information, creating contents, reporting news, and analyzing information.
Both of definitions for those two words mention “Internet”.
Crowd sourced News platforms all based on the distribution and intelligence of Internet. The following news platforms take advantages of the Internet based crowd intelligence.
Google News Lab, the aim of distributing this platform is to collaborate with journalism and entrepreneurs to create an outlet for news and information. It allows a limitless sight to real time story anywhere and anytime.
Newzulu provides platforms for citizen journalist to not only upload contents, but also publish and get paid. It creates a community of over 150,000 professional and citizen journalists who share and break news to the world as it happens,” says Newzulu.
Jamie, one of University of Oregon’s journalism student said,
“I have used Newzulu’s platform before for finding news-worthy topics to cover, I believe it is like a data storage place for me to find valuable news.”
Grasswire, is a news based platform for real time streaming news. It is a websites collects real-time information from users. According to the team’s introduction of Grasswire, this first-hand information crowd sourced from Twitter and now allows users to accurate news tweets by voting and verifying information with a fact-checking system.
Another example of crowdsourcing publication would be Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed covers news by using the power of social media.
Buzzfeed News covers news about Egypt air based on the authorized and verified tweets. In the article “Everything We Know About EgyptAir Flight MS804” by Buzzfeed, the article includes three Twitter screenshots from Flightradar24, BBC Breaking News, and Egyptair. The pictures used in this news piece are also from twitter users’ posts. Social media platforms like Twitter gather and sort real time news updates and valuable information pieces like video and photos from witnesses by hashtags.
The power of citizen journalism also shows in the way that social media allows people upload and react to breaking news faster. For example, the news for Whitney Houston’s death, which was reported on Twitter an hour before it published in mainstream publication press media. People post on social media immediately when they heard anything or see anything happening, the handful portal devices and easy access to social media contribute in shortening the time of producing news compare to mainstream press media.
Another example shows the power of crowdsourcing and citizen journalism is the ‘Boston marathon horrific bombing”. The police department sent a tweet requesting amateur video footages. The crowdsourcing images and footages provide more cues and facts in almost every aspect.
The trend of crowdsourcing on social media blurs the line of citizen journalism and professional journalism. The crowdsourcing is powerful for any people can become the source of news and information. However, the false information and the ability to mislead are also powerful. According to a research did by “Social Media Today”, it shows that 49.1% of online social media platform users have been tricked by “fake breaking news”. If professional journalists could understand the ways of distinguishing false and accurate information, they could take crowdsourcing and citizen journalism as great strategy for gathering and analyzing news.
