After reading the chapter "News Blogs and Citizen Journalism" in Axel Bruns' book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond, I couldn't keep myself from thinking that the American public is over informed. Since the creation of the world wide web, news has been at the fingertips of every American at any given time of day. There seems to be an over abundance of news outlets. Now it seems that all of the regular news isn't enough for people. Now we have sites that are called citizen journalism sites where people post news that is important to them. One such site is NowPublic.When I visited this site, I noticed it contained a lot of news stories that I had already seen on traditional news sites. Of course there were items that I was not familiar with but it just seemed as if average joe went to a news site and and came back and rewrote something that interested him. I don't wish to offend the citizen journalists however, I do want to get a better understanding of how and why these sites were created. I think I may be overly offended by this because I am personally affected by what happens in the traditional journalsim business.
For my research paper, I wish to take a look further into the idea and creation of citizen journalism. Three topics that come to mind are:
1) Can and will citizen journalism take the place of traditional journalism?
2) How does the gatekeeping process guarantee the articles being posted are authentic?
3) How is citizen journalism redefining traditional journalism?
I'm so excited that you picked this topic. I read the chapter in Bruns and was thinking that it might be something of an interest to you. If you check out my blog, I posted an NPR blog post that has to do with this discussion of the fate of printed news. The radio segment is more interesting, and I will try to find it to share with the class.
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