We Are Journalists and Citizens, not Citizen Journalists

Madi Kregel
mk790316@ohio.edu

We all heard it in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Fake News.
A term the man, who eventually became our president, threw around press conferences often. At the time we journalism students were just high school students. And here we are, journalism students learning how to bring people the news they need properly and ethically while living in a world where you can update your newsfeed every millisecond.

I can't help but think what President Trump saw was actually citizen journalism, which in ways can be fake news. Citizen Journalism is the act of a normal citizen without any journalism education reporting an event or incident without knowledge or resources to back up what actually is going on. It is so easy for people today to snap a picture of something that looks newsworthy and report on twitter what looks like is going on in the photo.

For instance, a woman is sleeping on a bench in a park with her mouth agape, so you take a picture of her. You don't know her, you've never seen her before in your life. But it is broad daylight, she's clearly not awake or aware that you're staring at her, and it looks like she could be on drugs to you. So you snap a picture of her and tag the local police department on Twitter, and post, "This woman is in the park I think she is on heroin." The police rush to the scene and reporters show up because they saw your tweet after it's been retweeted by many people in the area. The police go to the woman, and before they can touch her she wakes up startled and confused. She wasn't on any drugs at all, she was just resting during her lunch hour.

Now I made this story up, and I would guess that the police would be smart enough to contact the woman who tweeted the photo and ask her to check on the woman on the bench to see if she were breathing and had a strong pulse. But my point is, it is as simple as seeing something and misunderstanding the situation.

The issue with citizen journalism is the lack of resources and credibility that is put into what is reported or better put, "posted."However, as journalists, we should take citizen journalism as an advantage to our work.

IMAGE SOURCE: maichimai2611.wordpress.com
Link to interesting article that includes the image.

Reporting factual news that will be beneficial to the public is just one aspect of journalism ethics that has been understood for decades. But now more than ever journalists have to hold themselves accountable for the work they put into reporting a news story and providing factual evidence they are given. Citizen journalism can be used by journalists as a way to strengthen their reporting by giving them an opportunity to show the resources they used to find the information reported, as well as give resources for readers to use in the case of a disaster or event. Not only that, citizen journalism allows for journalists to show how much they follow their code of ethics in their work.

So yes, citizen journalism can cause a lot of controversy and confusion, but we as journalists can act upon the confusion and report factual information properly.

*The link attached included more information regarding citizen journalism and film that I found very interesting and ties into the same topic of "what is fake and what is factual?"*