All Or Nothing?

Does it have to be all or nothing?

Recent events such as the tsunami disaster (where blogs helped in covering the enormous size of the story), the war in Iraq (where blogs help to present both opinions of all parties involved), the Dan Rather's scandal, a CBS Evening News anchor who reported as authentic a series of forged documents about George W. Bush (where blogs were highly instrumental in exposing him) have all contributed to the growing popularity of citizen journalism. So, why is there a recent growth in popularity of citizen journalism? Is it because of the scandals that has eroded the credibility of traditional journalism or is out of touch with today's media landscape? And does any of it eventually mean the decline of traditional journalism?

Citizen journalism, We media, Participatory media, or Citizen media, as it is also called, is the act of citizens playing an active role in the collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating of news and information. This is essentially the act of extending the "press" to what was traditionally called the audeience. Citizen journalism is one of key importance especially because it provides independent, wide-ranging, and to some extent relevant information which created a democratic environment as far as information goes.

Traditional journalism, on the other hand, whose "Super Concepts" are truthful, unbiased, full and fair makes it a style of writing that presents only bare facts of the stories and events it covers. However, journalism has time and time again bared witness to many scandals one of the most widely known of which is the infamous article "Jimmy's world" by Janet Cooke, a journalist for the Washington Post, in which she wrote about the profile of a life of an 8-year old heroin addict, which let readers to sympathize with Jimmy, the little boy. Cooke even went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for her article which was later revoked when evidence pointed out that that in fact there was there was no existence of such a boy. Another incidence includes the fabrication and plagiarisms in numerous articles by Jayson Blair, a Times reporter, who was exposed in 2003 after his article: "After effects: The Missing; Family Waits, Now Alone, for a Missing Soldier", in which he incorporated passages from an article that was published earlier in The San Antonio Express.

Traditional journalism has also prided itself as being an objective source of media, but pure objectivity is just a mirage. The limitation of human nature causes us to be biased, as we all have opinions which we directly or indirectly express in our communication, Added to this the financial, time and area space causes journalism to be subjective to a certain degree. But, another question arises, is subjectivity, an expression of one's opinions, necessarily bad? After all opinions give meaning to facts. One may argue that the presentation of opinions in the media would preclude people from making their own judgments, but aren't peoply independent beings with a mind of their own?

However, from the standpoint of traditional journalism where the audience has a trusted relationship with the media source or media person it might not be such good idea to be subjective mostly because of the certain sense of loyalty of the audience member towards his/her particular news station or news source. This sense of loyalty towards the station could cause a spiral of silence among the audience members. For example, ABC news program Nightline's decision to read the names of the men and women who had died during the Iraq war became a statement against the war, not because of what Nightline said but because many people assumed their attitude was antiwar. So, the answer is instead citizen journalism. Citizen journalism because of the fact that it is provided by numerous independent individuals, who do not have a corporate schedule to follow, and whose audience members do not have a sense of loyalty towards the blogger would cause the audience members to approach the content with more criticism leaving room for the member's own opinions and ideas. And, this ultimately gives the audience members a mind of their own.

Also, because of traditional journalism's function to serve both the individual and the society at the same time, there may arise a conflict of interests. Citizen media can help resolve this conflict because they are "stand alone" journalists who don't have to be accountable to the government. Essentially, it further strengthens the notion of freedom of speech.

Since, participatory media means that any one can be a blogger there posses a problem, there is a vast clutter of blogs which need to be filtered. Some bloggers do this themselves through RSS feeds, which provide a short description of the content like headlines that are sent towebpages like Bloglines or homepages offered by Yahoo, Google and MSN along with a link to the full content. Another way of filtering through blogs is by using aggregates which pull content from a range of sites and rank the results in different ways.

So, will this initial competition posed by citizen media turn into a threat that will eventually lead to the decline of traditional journalism? I don't think so. Although during the occurrence of vivid and enormous events such as the tsunami disaster, and the September 11 attack bloggers may have a competitive edge over traditional journalism as agreed upon by a journalist at the New York Times, John Schwartz, who states "For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of the tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs."

Essentially, what has happened to the media is that its empire has broken down into many more centers of control and power. This is a source of significant threat for the old media, because of its declining influence. In reaction to the threat of declining influence there has been a noticeable change in the media which has now become more transparent, efficient and more interactive. But, even with this change traditional media has no way of ensuring that it along will have significant influence over the public. For example, some former sources to the media are now taking journalism into their own hands by directly posting their web logs onto the internet instead of speaking through the media where the content would be filtered or some form of message distortion would occur because of alteration, expansion or limitation.