Tuesday 16 October 2012

The rise and rise of UGC

Rodney King - Beaten and tasered after a high speed chase by police officers.
Six days of riots followed in LA. Sparked interest in racial profiling and attitudes of police towards African Americans.
George Holiday shot it on his video camera.

With improvements in technology citizen journalists are becoming more common. Gives citizens powers to make and break news. Most news organisations now a way to interact with citizen journalists through many different sources for example, a forum website, chatrooms or message boards.

The foundation and building blocks of social networking websites are UGC.

When there are natural disasters happening and the television crews cant get in the often rely on the citizen journalists to provide insights, footage and something to report on. It is often more hard-hitting and emotional than professionally shot news footage because it provides a true insight into the happenings.

Citizen journalists have been useful during disasters such as the Asian Tusnami in 2004 and the July bombings in London 2005.

People have questioned that when citizen journalists are helping to produce news and broadcast dangerous situations are they endangering themselves and are the producers of the news show endangering them further by showing their tweets and footage that they are sending out.

Gate keepers are still there in the mainstream news broadcasting as they decide what makes major news


1)     The term citizen journalist refers to normal civilians of the community that have no background in journalism, contributing to main stream news. This can be through emailing news, or filming footage for example.
2)     One of the first examples of citizen journalism is the Rodney King situation that I have already talked about previously in the article.
3)      News organisations offer potential citizen journalists oppourtunites to provide them with news stories, through things like fourms, website, comments page, blog or twitter.
4)      Obviously there are going to be differences between proffresionaly shot footage and footage from citizen journalists. For example citizen footage is going to be of a lower quality in terms of the picture, but the footage with have a raw feel to it, have edge and potentially carry a better message of how bad a situation is, because of the rawness of the footage.
5)     A gatekeeper is a person or organisation that decides what gets put in or on the mainstream news, in this case. They decide what we see, in what order and almost how we should feel about it, they do this by choosing the words they say carefully and also the mise-en-scene.
6)     The role of gatekeepers has changed because the internet has emerged significantly allowing people to become their own producer and broadcast their own messages without the need of gatekeepers. The internet allows them to reach a wide target audience without the need for gatekeepers.
7)    Journalists feel that there wont be as much demand for them in the future because citizen journalists are producing as interesting pieces that organisations are using as them, the professionals  This wil have a negative effect on the journalism industry and in the end see them run out of business.

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