Mutualisation of news

• Citizen journalism - seen as equals now as creating own news footage.
• "There was a very clear wall, dividing readers and writers" - Alan Rusbridger comments on what it was like before the invention of User Generated Content.
• Comment is Free - now has 1000 think pieces a month - page traffic in May 2009 rose to 9.3 million.
• Rusbridger argues that citizen journalism is still to restricted to codes and conventions of newspaper writing.
• He thinks websites like Twitter and social networking sites will allow more freedom for journalists to develop direct relationships with its readers.
• This is an advantage of social networking, and the importance of its existence for not only consumers, but producers as well.
• June 2009 - The Guardian technology pod on Twitter - 682,000 followers
• This shows the enormous impact cross-platform journalism is having on society. The fact that the public is able to visit their favourite social networking sites and still be able to find out the latest news.
• According to Rusbridger, all information coming from the public should be treated as primary sources and examined. This suggests there is still a considerable difficulty in trusting certain sources on the Internet and seems to indicate a disadvantage with User Generated Content.
• An advantage of UGC would be the reporting of the death of Ian Tomlinson, where footage was shown from the scene of the crime that was taped with a bystander's mobile phone.
• Similar to the Rodney King case in 1998, the public outcry emphasised the unreliability of traditional news broadcasting methods, who were unable to capture this footage. Some argue that the journalists at the scene deliberately did not capture the footage in anticipation that they would be humiliating the British justice system for its incompetence.