Hunters and Gatherers… of media

If I see a fight, a fire or a French man eating frogs legs I can talk about what I saw and post it on the World Wide Web for all to view and I could do it however I want.. I wouldn’t have to consult a higher authority as to when and how I should post this content

Congratulations Joel you have now graduated from the University of Web with a degree in Citizen Journalism… My mum’s going to be so proud

In the past it would not have been my job or possibly right to tell a story so that ANYONE could see it, this would be due to my qualifications. In an age where the kids are called anti-social it’s funny how much socialising actually goes on. People just mention a topic and then others can contribute and expand on what it is they feel about a topic forming a collective intelligence. There have been several cases recently on Facebook where customers of stores write into these stores with a story and this is presented on Facebook. If these stories are interesting which many are then they go viral… so here is a person with no journalism qualification getting their story read by millions!

A 21 year old American girl, Casey Sasser wrote up a story about her act of kindness this received 79000 likes and 2000 shares which would mean it got a large amount of views around the world!

Let me repeat she is NOT a journalist!!!

A problem that does occur with stories such as this one, which are not filtered and no authority has read over it is how do we know that it is true? This shouldn’t be such a big issue, let’s be honest there are still lies in the newspaper and that goes through a process of review and publishing .

The Newspapers main tactic isn’t to make citizen journalists look like liars, no they have a much harder job, they have to ‘stop the audience being publishers.’ Even Mr Newspaper himself, Rupert Murdoch, knows that the Newspaper is a dying breed.

There are still some optimistic journalists such as Andrew Marr a BBC political presenter that thinks citizen journalism “is not going to replace journalism” and I say good luck to that. Jay Rosen on the other hand believes that Journalists are ‘not a special class’

It will be extremely interesting over the next few years or decades to see how the saga of open versus closed pans out!