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Citizen Journalism is Killing Professional Journalism

Opinion Piece 

Citizen journalism is an emerging form of journalism that is radically different from traditional journalism in philosophy and practice. The emergence of citizen journalism correlates with developments in digital technology: rapid global growth and use of the Internet and more recently. Citizen journalism has grown from a small network of independent media centres and user-generated discussion forums into a world-wide movement comprised of individuals and networked communities operating independently or in collaboration with mainstream media.
Citizen media includes a broad aspect of activities that citizens follow individually or in collaboration with other citizen journalists and citizens media organizations or with professional journalists and media organizations.

This kind of Journalism is becoming popular because now people do not buy newspapers as they get news, Videos and audios for free on social networks. An regime change protest that occurred in Egypt last year was branded “facebook revolution” due to the fact that citizens were posting pictures, Videos on social networks such as facebook, Twitter,  this created a situation where Journalists had to compete with citizens when reporting news or taking pictures, Videos.

Citizen Journalism is killing Professional Journalism because the more people get used to the idea of citizen Journalism the professional one wont be taken into consideration as people will think they are able to do what Journalists do of which is not true. The kind of reporting that Professional Journalists provide is way better than the citizen one and Journalists also know the ethics of Journalism of which citizens do not know of.

Competition for reporting stories becomes a big challenge to Journalists because in most cases you find that Journalists do not cover a story and immediately publish it because they have to maybe wait for the next day in order for them to break the story. But citizens will immediately post about the story on social networks and people will see no reason of going to buy a newspaper to read what they already know and this is bad for professional Journalism.

This form of Journalism is badly affecting the Professional journalism because now there is unnecessary competition which is mainly due to the rapidly developing internet. For example people these days have personal Blogs which they use to post whatever they like including posting stories that they were involved in and though this might be great for users... this is detrimental for Journalism as now the audience is shifting from reading newspapers to reading blogs online and if newspaper are not selling it means more Journalists will lose Jobs.