Citizen Journalism - Comment

This blog comment was of great value to me as it incorporated research across a number of fields. Unlike topics such as produsage where research is very limited and restricted to field experts, citizen journalism incorporates philosophies from across the communication, public relations, new media and web 2.0 domains. As the information relevant to this issue is so diverse, to gauge an accurate insight into what citizen journalism is, what it provides both positively and negatively and how it exists within the wider online content production environment, each of these disciplines must be considered individually and interdependently.

I tried to incorporate this into my blog and achieved it appropriately through making initial comment on the issues surrounding communication, quoting communication experts, Wayne Murphy, Stephen Harrington and John Hartley. I then developed this towards citizen journalism by addressing the impact the web 2.0 has had on communication and then moved away from general communication and towards citizen journalism. From this i was then able to focus on providing a definition, positives and negatives and possible trends in the future.

One downside to the way in which i targeted citizen journalism was my breadth of attack. As i addressed this issue from such a broad perspective, i faced a huge pool of information. As a result, i often found myself reigning in my blog, trying to avoid following every possible tangent that presented itself. I feel that overall i produced a fairly well balanced and concise overview of what Citizen Journalism is and how it has evolved. However, as i became carried away on quite a number of occasions i would question whether or not, i sacrificed the point of the blog.

I was trying to portray how communication had reached such a stage that the public were simply passive consumers of content and not since the golden age of politics had viewers been interested in the content they were receiving. However with the birth of the web 2.0 and citizen journalism, communication was returning to an active state and the public domain is no longer just the media.

Although this provided a good platform for discussion on wider issues and wider reading, when going over my blog, i noticed that i missed a number of possible links and relationships that existed within a narrower field. On closer inspection i did not focus heavily enough on how citizen journalism related to wider KCB201 course content, terms or trends. In retrospect, i could have improved my blog by relating Citizen Journalism more directly to Open Source Content Production, to produsage and most definitely to creative content production, but did not achieve this in the blog comment i posted online.

This may have harmed my blog comment on a small scale, but reading it through, unless you highlight this fact, the blog still provides quality information on a wide range of issues both surrounding and directly related to citizen journalism. So all in all i am still happy with my contribution.