“Citizen Journalism” Comes Of Age, Virginia Tech Massacre Proves That!

Posted on April 17, 2007
Filed Under Journalism |

If there was any doubt left that the age of the so-called Citizen Journalist has arrived, it vanished with the clearing gunsmoke at Virginia Tech where a 23 year old senior apparently killed 33 people, including himself.

A student of mine tells me her friends who go to Virginia Tech were way ahead of the mainstream news media on many facts as the enormity of the massacre became apparent.

Text messages. Cell phone still shots and video. Emails. Even My-Space—all were used by students at the university to keep in touch with one another and to spread the news as soon as it became available to them.

In at least one case, a “citizen journalist”–a student–made it into the media bigtime by making a deal with CNN to air his cell phone video and audio of what the shootings sounded like outside the building where the slaughter was taking place.

Of course, this is not the first time the mainstream media had to reply on “reporting” from lay people….during the horrific bombing of the London subway a while back, the very first video of what happened deep beneath the streets of London came courtesy of passengers on the trains armed with nothing more than their picture cell phones.

There is nothing wrong with ordinary people, non-journalists, taking part in news gathering…that has been done since news became a product to be sold. But, extremes are seldom good and we must all be on guard because most of the “news” reported by citizen journalists does not go through any fact checking process and is usually presented without context–something professional journalists, print and electronic, are trained to do and have plenty of experience with.

There is no reason to believe that this new form of journalism, practiced outside the mainstream media but often influencing it, nontheless, will not increasingly become a part of our daily news consumption. The trick will be to learn how to weed out the the garbage so that what is left is a gemstone. Not as easy as that may seem.!

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