Information Society Watch

September 12, 2007, BBC News Service

News has traditionally been in the domain of professional journalists. Recently there has been attempts to democratize this further in the form of news that is reported by ordinary citizens. The article looks at the results of a study which analyses the differences between the news reported by professionals in the field as opposed to citizen journalists. The news reported by citizens on the Internet seems to have a marked technology flavour which is probably because netizens are more inclined to such information. Another major finding is that the citizen news had less focus on one main item, and tended to spread the interest among multiple news stories. In conclusion, mainstream journalism and citizen journalism do have certain different viewpoints, but will probably co-exist without a problem as they address different needs of different sets of people.

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