Citizen Journalism - What Is It ?

Citizen journalism is open publishing of DIY media content such as stories, images or video sources produced by any users/participates who wish to be apart of public discussion. Some citizen journalism sites are:

- Indymedia: political activism and alternative globalisation

- Slashdot: technology news and legal issues

- OhMy News: South Korean and Japanese news and politics

- Wikipedia & Wikinews: general news and information

- Current.tv: video news and documentaries

- News blogs

The traditional news process is known as gatekeeping, where there is input: gathered news by journalists; output: closed editorial by news company; and response: the edited piece to be made public. This is different to the citizen journalism news process known as gatewatching; which starts with gatewatching: open to all users to gatewatch for news sources; input: submissions of gatewatched stories, open to all users; output: instant publishing of stories, open to all users; and response: discussion and commentary open to all users.

Free/Open Source software

Open source software is when users can read, redistribute, modify and improve software source code to evolve the software. Muir in his Open Source: Software & beyond... lecture talks about the four main free software principles:
"1. Freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
2. Freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs.
3. Freedom to redistribute copies so you can help you neighbour.
4. Freedom to improve the program and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits."
Some free software models are Linux, OpenOffice and Firefox. Open source is a form of produsage, as everyone can contribute and there is shared ownership. The benefits of open source software is that there is faster development of the software including upgrades, direct response to requests and suggestions for the software, greater transparency and it costs nothing to purchase the software or upgrades. Problems however, is the lack of financial support for open source software and the cost for switching from commercial software like Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office or Microsoft Windows; over to open source software.

Produsage

Produsage is a common term now being used when terms like DIY media and collaboration are mentioned. A term defined Snurb at produsage.org as “the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement.” According to Snurb there are four preconditions of produsage:

“1. Open participation, communal evaluation

2. Fluid Heterarchy

3. Unfinished Artefacts, Continuing Process

4. Common Property, Individual Rewards”

The first precondition means that the more people participate, the more input and therefore better quality of output information. Everyone has different skills, ideas and knowledge and as each person brings this to the process of produsage, a broader understanding can be developed with the continual process of contributing through evaluation. The second precondition means that everyone’s contribution is valuable as together all the contributions become equal and therefore better quality is revealed. The process allows users to work at the same time as each other in their contributions.

The third precondition means that people can continually add, change, evaluate and update the content and therefore the process remains continually unfinished. This way there are gradual developments to the communities shared content. The fourth precondition means that content created must always remain available to present and future participates for evaluations and updates. If these four preconditions are met then the creative content remains a part of produsage content for the community to share and learn from.

Brunes talks abut the advantages and disadvantages of produsage in his podcast Produsage. He identifies three advantages, “faster more frequent updates…greater involvement of the community…and outcomes are available to all.” This means that there are fewer delays which would normally be caused by editing and upgrading, can be made immediately. The community interests are represented by a more diverse range of user and shared development means shared ownership as a community. The disadvantages Brunes identifies are, “mistaken updates may be made available…community knowledge may be limited…and communities may have internal disagreements.” This means that there is potential room for errors to be included as there is no real editing completed and the community may not support the views of minority groups.

DIY Media and Collaboration

With the continual development of new technologies in today’s society, DIY media and collaboration are emerging more and more on the Internet in a number of domains such as online publishing, open source software, media sharing, creative practice, reviews, social bookmarking, geotagging, knowledge management and DIY advice just to name a few. DIY media and collaboration is making pathways for people to develop new skills in professional areas of work, with information reaching a larger audience and in a variety of different ways. It is the production of individuals in a collaborative environment, shared with millions of users around the world. There are some main principles with the production of DIY media and Collaboration, where online communities become content creators. The distribution of the content is created by a wide community of participants, with equal movement between leaders, participants and users of the content. The content continually remains unfinished and the process of content creators continues with other user continually addressing, reinterpreting and evolving the content produced by other users. There is no ownership within these sites and participation is based on merit, as the content is continually collaborated.

DIY media and collaboration removes the boundaries, with collaboration of more participates in numerous environments. Some websites within the domains or DIY media and collaboration are becoming regular website names in the everyday activities of Internet users. For example of blogs and open news sites like Slashdot, Indymedia and Ohmy News are becoming regular online publishing access sites. With media sharing and creative practice, more and more people are logging on to sites like Flickr, YouTube, Jumpcut and Current.tv, Wikipedia is a well know knowledge management website to most Internet users. Social bookmarking and geotagging sites are becoming more popular like del.icio.us, digg, Google Earth and Frapper. These DIY media and collaboration websites are becoming more popular with the everyday Internet users as forms of both professions use and recreation use.

Bruns talks about the challenges for established content industries in his DIY Media and Collaboration podcast. For example with “citizen journalism: undermines authority of mainstream news media, provides alternative views.” With this come possible opportunities between industry and communities to harness the DIY media and collaboration process and work together to continually create collaborative content.

The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)

The Difference Between Web 1.0 & Web 2.0

The development of Web 2.0 has allowed DIY communities to emerge in many different domains from open source software development, online publishing, media sharing, creative practice, knowledge management and reviewing. It has allowed online communities to become content creators, with a large number of participants with the outcome always remaining unfinished through “evolutionary, iterative and palimpsestic development” (Bruns, 2008). Many people question what the difference is between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, basically Web 1.0 can be identified as static or still, where the information is read and becomes history. This is different to Web 2.0 which is more flexible in that information can be read by users but also continually updated so to become present information. O’Reilly explains this through some examples in his article What is Web 2.0;

Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick	-->	Google AdSense
Ofoto	-->	Flickr
Akamai	-->	BitTorrent
mp3.com	-->	Napster
Britannica Online	-->	Wikipedia
personal websites	-->	blogging
evite	-->	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	-->	search engine optimization
page views	-->	cost per click
screen scraping	-->	web services
publishing	-->	participation
content management systems	-->	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	-->	tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness	-->	syndication

O’Reilly writes about Web 2.0 as a new platform for the Internet in which new rules of understanding are created. Quoted in Bruns (2008) Podcast: DIY Media and Collaboration, there are three rules of understanding;

“ 1. Don’t treat software as an artifact, but as a process of engagement with your user.

2. Open your data and services for re-use by others, and re-use the data and services of others whenever possible.

3. Don’t think of applications that reside on either client or server, but build applications that reside in the space between devices.”

The creation and adaption of Web 2.0 sites allows for the user to participate and contribute to the content shared on the Internet. However, although positive in the affect of user participation, challenges do arise within the content created; such as in citizen journalism alternate views are created often undermining the influence and power of main stream news media. Or with wiki sites like Wikipedia, there is of course a broader and more varied coverage of information and topics than print encyclopedias, however the quality and reliability comes into question. Possible opportunities can arise from this between industries and communities to work together harnessing this development through cooperation of Pro-Am participation, where amateurs work to professional standards. This can combat some of the content creator challenges and allows communities to work together to continually upgrade society’s knowledge management. Go2Web20 is the complete Web 2.0 dictionary linking users with Web 2.0 sites. There is also a great video on YouTube called The Machine is us/ing Us, which describes Web 2.0 is a fun and informative way.