The Milestones of Citizen Journalism
The development of participatory journalism through the years
The emergence of blogs
The early 2000’s saw the spread of blogs as a new way of receiving and consuming news that challenged traditional methods.
2001- 9/11 terrorist attacks
Many people believe the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers was the start of the digital age and marked the beginning of citizen journalism.
In 2001, many of the major communication platforms that exist today were in their nascent stages. Facebook and Gmail would not be invented for another 3 years and Twitter for another 5 years. Only a few people had basic mobile phones and there was no wireless internet access.
When the twin towers went up in flames, the whole world went into shock. People at the scene were creating their own news through eye-witness accounts, capturing images and videos of what was happening from their mobile devices.
Allen Stuart in his book “reweaving the internet: Online news of September 11th” explained how during the first hours of the attack, news websites from all around America collapsed and became largely inaccessible, leaving Americans without vital sources of information when they needed it the most.
“in the early hours after the attack, most of the country’s major news sites were so overburdened with ‘Web Traffic’ that they were unable to operate efficiently”- Stuart Allen
Dan Gillmor, director of the Centre for Citizen Media described the chaos as “a galvanising point for the blogging world”.
Citizens of New York turned to other sources of communication such as email, instant messaging, forums, blogs and online journals to find and share information that had been posted in online communities and mailing lists to try and connect with those in the city to find out what was happening.
People used these forums to post images, videos and share news on survivors lists to large audiences that could access the internet to read about what was happening, rather than trying to load failing news websites.
“We had this explosion of personal, public testimony and some of it was quite powerful,” Gillmor said.
The tragic events of 9/11 was a major turning point for citizen journalism, as traditional news media were challenged by ordinary citizens as they couldn't compete with the explicit, continuous content uploaded onto the ‘blogosphere’.
2004- Boxing day Tsunami earthquake
On December 26th in 2004, a 9.2 magnitude earthquake occurred under the Indian Ocean off the Western Coast of Northern Sumatra in Indonesia, making it the fourth largest earthquake in modern times.
According to The Telegraph, 14 countries were hit, five million people were affected and 230, 000 were killed.
The Asian Tsunami was another defining moment in the use of blogs for citizen journalism. The natural disaster was one of the first events where dominant images used in the news came from ordinary people and tourists who were at the scene filming.
“It was not the first event to use citizen journalism, but it was the first disaster where the dominant images came from ordinary people”- The Conversation
For the first 24 hours, all reported coverage was images and videos sent in from people first-hand.
A blog site, Information Today Inc describes how citizens created blogs as interactive resources that tried to help humanitarian aid efforts and disseminated vital information to people.
An example of blogs that were created immediately after the disaster struck include the Tsunami Blog and Tsunami Disaster. These were put together to inform others on what was happening, to allow people to make direct donations, learn of the tsunami’s effects and assist in finding missing persons and relatives.
In the hours and days during and after the disaster, the number of blog sites increased creating a snowball effect of linkage. Blog sites began referring people to other informative places such as Yahoo, who created a directory for Tsunami Blogs that people could visit.
The Tsunami was a pivotal point in the timeline of citizen journalism as it was one of the first events where traditional media recognised ordinary people as contributing to useful journalism. It was an example of citizens keeping one another informed during a time of great need, bringing people together as a community.
2005- 7/7 bombings:
On July the 7th 2005, a terrorist attack in London saw three underground trains and a double-decker bus bombed in the city centre, killing 52 people and injuring over 700 others.
The first reports of this tragic event, that happened during the busy early morning commuting time, came from people at the scene who were videoing the attacks on their phone camera’s.
Stuart Allen describes in his book how the attacks marked the first time there had been an immediate reaction to an event, through content captured on mobile phone cameras. Images and videos of ordinary city-goers had been heavily relied on to report on the attacks and people were praised for showing a real angle on the event as it was taking place in the absence of journalists.
“People were sending us images within minutes of the first problems, before we even knew there was a bomb”- Helen Boaden, BBC Director of News
Over the period that the attack was happening, the BBC received more than 1,000 pictures, 20 video’s from phone cameras, 4,000 text messages and around 20,000 emails.
Several news sites created pages dedicated to eye-witness content from people who had seen the attacks first-hand. Several BBC reporters gathered their own first-hand information in a blog titled ‘The BBC’s ‘Reporters’ Log: London Explosions’.
Similarly, the BBC News site also created a forum named “London explosions: your accounts” that was dedicated to ordinary citizens, who had witnessed the attacks and wanted to share what they had seen. The page encouraged users to share their own experiences and photos with others.
7/7 started to allow people and traditional journalists alike to accept the value of citizen journalism and was a huge turning point for this kind of democracy. Ordinary people with camera phones had suddenly become a major factor within news reporting.
The emergence of social media:
The latter half of the 2000’s saw a change in citizen journalism, in that there was more reporting and distributing of news through social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
2007- Virginia Tech Mass Shooting in Austin, Texas
On April 16th 2007, a mass shooting took place at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. The killer, 23 year old Seung-Hui Cho was a senior at Virginia Tech majoring in English and killed 33 people in the massacre before taking his own life.
During the shooting, students and staff began to use social media sites to collect information on what was happening and used Facebook to communicate with one another, posting images and videos to inform relatives and those on the outside world of what was happening.
After the attack, Facebook was also used to name the young victims of the tragedy. In a few hours, all 32 victims were identified via the site and around 15 tribute pages were created for the victims.
Adam Crowe in his book described this tragic event as
“Sociologically amazing that a collection of people with loosely held connections could come to this level of information accuracy in a mere few hours”
After the massacre, American news channel CNN published live footage from a mobile phone taken from the scene by a Virginia Tech graduate student named Jamal Albarghouti. The student captured some as-it-happened video of the gunfire.
According to Broadcasting Cable, this was the only live footage taken of the event. It showed the attack unfolding as it happened, whilst all other coverage showed the aftermath once the tragedy had concluded.
This use of social media, in particular Facebook, during the tragic event was another huge break-through for citizen journalism. It was evident that Facebook was becoming a more popular way to communicate and consume news with other people.
2013- Edward Snowden’s discovery
29 year old Edward Snowden is responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history.
As explained in the the Columbia Journalism Review, the former National Security Agency employee leaked information about US global surveillance to The Guardian which “changed the way the public viewed their online lives forever”.
Snowden described how the US government collects different kinds of private data on its citizens and sparked worldwide conversation about digital security and safety.
“I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”- Snowden to The Guardian
The information leaks changed journalism forever. Snowden made the public aware of GDPR rights, which includes the right to be informed, right of access, and right to be forgotten to name a few and made journalists more wary of source protection.
He created room for participatory journalism with his actions and enabled the public to take back control and make their own decisions about what to publish and why. The leaks also triggered the popular debate within journalism about whether it is more important to be impartial or truthful.
2016- Facebook Live
Currently, Facebook is the leading social media site for news consumption amongst adults, with around 35% of people using this platform, making it one of the leading news gatekeepers in the world.
According to The Conversation, Facebook live has given the public more opportunity to film everything and anything, anywhere in real-time. Posting live videos gives audiences a greater feel for realism and authenticity, and shows that news is becoming more visual. Seeing a piece of news develop as it happens can gain lots more audience attention and can create instant emotional reactions.
However, the blog also suggests that it’s introduction hasn’t had such a positive impact.
There have been many reporting’s of upsetting videos posted online, where people have even filmed their suicides and deaths via the live device.
For example, Facebook live streamed the murder of a 74-year-old grandfather Robert Godwin in 2017 and a father in Thailand broadcast himself killing his 11-month-old daughter before killing himself in the same video.
According to The Guardian, these clips were accessible to users on both Facebook profile’s for 24 hours and were together viewed almost 400,000 times.
According to The Sun, Facebook’s live video function can be easily selected at the top of your news feed by selecting “Live Video” from the drop-down menu. The Facebook user can instantly start filming and anyone can watch if they have selected the audience as public and not just for connected friends.
Facebook’s ability to provide anyone with such exclusive content at the click of a button makes citizen journalism far more accessible and easy for anyone to achieve. However, it’s clear that this kind of freedom needs some boundaries in order to work in the intended safe and sensible way.
2019- London Bridge attack
A more positive use of citizen journalism could be the recent London bridge terrorist attack. In heroic videos and images captured by citizens on buses and in cars on the bridge, you can see members of the public and policemen tackling the convicted to the ground whilst using a fire extinguisher.
Some of the footage also showed one man grab a 5ft narwhal tusk off the wall where the attack unfolded, which he used to keep the terrorist on the ground.
Unfortunately, a young man and women died as a result of the attack and several others were rushed to hospital with injuries. However, the citizen journalists that were on the bridge that day did not bring attention to the terrorist himself by sharing their videos but to the many hero’s that saved the lives of others, by working together to tackle the killer to the floor and making sure he was held responsible for his crimes.
These examples demonstrate the highs and lows and positives and negatives of citizen journalism and how it has developed throughout time. Today, according to Ofcom, over half of adults in the UK use social media platforms to keep up to date with the latest news. Whilst TV is still the most popular way to consume news, it’s use is slowly falling with each year whilst the use of social media is rising.
Is it possible that today citizen journalism is taken for granted as a form of contemporary media?
Despite these developments, the same challenge still remains; to create a balance between providing citizen journalists with the freedom to post whatever they want; to inform, to educate and for their own satisfaction whilst ensuring basic rules and regulations are used to monitor the content they post.