Reality and Realism

Benefits to institutions

 Divide between institution and audience is eroded.
 Power to make and break news.

Benefits to audience

 No longer passive receivers of news.
 Have become ‘users’ and users become publishers.
 Now create their own content.
 Divide between institution and audience is eroded.
 Safer – evidence of everything.

Examples

 1991 – video cameras become more common and more people afford them.
 Rodney King incident [1991] – 4 LA Police Officers charged of assault and excessive force for tasering and beating Rodney King.
 Asian Tsunami [2004] – turning point for UGC, created by Accidental Journalists (on-the-spot witness accounts – after couple of days, social networking sites had worldwide witness accounts on forums to help families get in touch.
 London bombings [2005] – citizen journalists influenced mainstream agenda. Footage from mobile phones. First-hand view was more uncompromising. Now everyone can see similar unmediated footage on the news.

UGC

 Message boards
 Citizen journalists
 Grassroots journalists
 Accidental journalists
 Chat rooms
 Q&A
 Polls
 Have your says
 Blogs with enabled commenting
 Bebo
 MySpace
 YouTube
 Facebook
 Wikipedia news
 Google news
-------------------------

What is meant by the term ‘citizen journalist’?

The term ‘Citizen Journalist’ means members of the public (‘ordinary people’) capture an event which is consider being important. They become producers when they upload the texts on sites such as YouTube. They are also referred to as accidental journalists' or 'grassroots journalists.

What was one of the first examples of news being generated by ‘ordinary people’?

The first ever text that was generated by an ‘ordinary person’ was the Rodney King incident which was captured by George Holliday. This was when he captured the event of Rodney King and the four police officers. As the officers surrounded him, tasered him and beat him with clubs. The event was filmed by George from his apartment window; Later the home-video footage made prime-time news and became an international media sensation, and a focus for complaints about police racism towards African-Americans.

List some of the formats for participation that are now offered by news organisations.

• Message boards
• Chat rooms
• Q&A, polls
• Have your says
• And blogs with comments enabled.

What is one of the main differences between professionally shot footage and that taken first-hand (UGC)?

The difference between professional shot footage and UGC footage is that the User Generated Content is hard-hitting and emotive. Therefore news is now considered to be old fashioned if it lacks the low quality grainy style of footage that is proved by citizen journalists.

What is a gatekeeper?

A gatekeeper is the organisation which decides the types of text that is/is not news and whether it will broadcast the content provided by the Citizen journalists is called a gatekeeper as they in other words filter the content for publication.

How has the role of a gatekeeper changed?

A gatekeepers job role has changed as it’s has become more important because before it had very little access to self-representation before such as youth groups, low income groups, and various minority groups may but now it has gained its own voice through the use of citizen journalism.

What is one of the primary concerns held by journalists over the rise of UGC?

The main concern held by journalists over the rise of UGC is that they are no longer needed in event as ‘ordinary people’ have become their own journalists and product better content. Therefore journalists fear that they will no longer have jobs in the future and leaving large organisation out of jobs as smaller core staff will manage and process UGC from citizen journalists, this is called 'crowd sourcing.'