Citizen Journalism and Media Vs Professional Digital Broadcasting

The idea of Citizen Journalism and Professional Broadcasting are seen as two seperate entities but in fact are one in the same. The Professional Broadcasting is site of the Citizen Journalism is dwarfed by the incredible amounts of information that the public gathers and can output.

The BBC use public information for their news articles and people can phone in but this was never more prevelant until the bombing attacks on the London underground on July 7th. According to Nieman.com the BBC news team has four people that handle the information sent in from the public. However, on the day of the bombings the four designated people were overwhelmed with the amount of information being sent their way.

Within the time space of six hours they received over 20,000, 4,000 text messages, 1,000 photos and 20 pieces of amatuer video footage. The sher volume of information and expediency of it is proof that with the inception of the internet and the world of Web 2.0 the 'News' is no longer attributed to 6 O'Clock and scheduled times of the day and just the T.V. and the newspapers.

According to an article written by Dr P Vyasamoorthy it states the statistics with regards to Citizen Journalism and figures surrounding the internet and its number of users for certain areas. The likes of blogs has over 133 million blogs on the internet with 900,000 blog posts a day. There are over 1.7 billion internet users worldwide, there are 12.7 billion videos watched by Americans in a month. With these huge figures and amounts of people across the globe interacting and talking and spreading news amongst each other across Facebook, email, Twitter, blogs and forums it is no wonder that Professional Broadcasting's relevancy has lessened in recent years. With the internet becoming more and more accessable from anywhere the need or want for Professional journalism in my opinion is dying.

The onslaught between Citizen Journalism and Professional Broadcasting will continue to war but the over all winner I find is that of Citizen Journalism. The public are closer to the stories than those sitting in the news rooms. They have the stories first, they have the first footage, they have the on site perspective that can be broadcast immediately.