In the past, I guess the only way to write a journal for the public to see is to be a journalist. An individual might simply need to go through the right channels and with strong language background just to be a journalist. However, with the help of advance technology comes with the uprising of “Citizen Journalism”. Now, journals are no longer written only by professional reporters and also by ordinary people like us. One of the more popular medium for citizen journalist is the “Stomp” and people are able to write any “news” and I mean ANY news. Of course, there will still be legitimate formal news but I’ve to admit that I’ve seen some ridiculous unconstructive “news” in it.
I guess the pros of citizen journalism are the fact that it gives ordinary people the sense of belonging and the freedom of speech. It also allows the release of catharsis as people can simply rant their feelings on the net and not just keeping it to themselves. However, I’m really not a big fan of “stomp” as I think the whole point of reporting news is to report facts. In addition, I do not think that we should report opinion based “news” and the probably this is the biggest problem with citizen journalism, whereby people do not know how to differentiate facts and opinions.
Although I’ve disclosed my displeasure for “Stomp”, I must say that Wikipedia serves much more purpose in our everyday lives. People are able to write definitions of words and edit other people’s work which provides us with direct information. I guess this is beneficial to must of us as I believe that majority of the information are valid and accurate but of course there’s on limitation. It is that students are not able to cite from Wikipedia for their research paper as lecturers do not recognize that as a legitimate source.
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