Citizen Journalism: A help, a hindrance....or a headache?

A discussion with a journalist revealed an interesting angle for our search to decide if citizen journalists are a help or a hindrance. It could be argued that pictures or videos sent in by a citizen journalist are always going to be helpful to a journalist in one way or another. But with the material a journalist, or someone, would have to sift through in order to choose something suitable it may cause a headache!

Think about it…the amount of footage that was used in the BBC coverage of the 7/7 London bomb attacks. The videos taken by citizen journalists would have been just a handful of the many that had been sent in. Someone had to judge them In terms of journalistic content. Someone had to check the quality of the videos. Many of the videos would have been taken by people with low quality footage on older camera phones. Footage that is badly distorted wouldn’t be suitable for broadcast on a television program.

Furthermore, someone would need to make sure the footage is in fact suitable for broadcast. An example of this would be the hanging of Saddam Husain. The footage shown on the TV was different to that shown on YouTube On TV you wouldn’t see him actually being hung, while citizen journalists in Iraq filmed his hanging in full. So if you desired you could search for it.

Another example would be back at the 7/7 attacks. Some footage would be deemed too gory for broadcast…no one would want to see bits of a blown up body while they’re eating their dinner in front of the 6 o clock news. So again a person, a journalist, has to choose what will actually end up on the television.

Essentially it comes down to this. Citizen Journalists are helpful to regular journalists, but when they are filming things…disasters…they won’t be thinking about ‘taste and decency’ and what will be suitable for broadcast. A journalist on the other hand knows what can and cannot be shown. So, a citizen journalist’s footage is useful…when it is suitable for broadcast. But it does cause the journalist a headache when they have to go through every single but of footage they are sent in to judge if it can be used….or not.