Mobile telephones have the potential to transform reporting and places the power of reporting in the hands of the public. Mobile telephony provides low-cost options for people to set up news operations. Images and stories from citizen journalists close to the World Trade Center offered content that played a major role in the story. In , when the 9. The microblog Twitter played an important role during the Iranian election protests , after foreign journalists had effectively been "barred from reporting".

Twitter delayed scheduled maintenance during the protests that would have shut down coverage in Iran due to the role it played in public communication. Sometimes citizen journalists are, at the same time, bloggers and after some time they often become professional journalists , just as [ when? Today, individually produced citizen journalism exists in the form of social media platforms such as blogs , YouTube , and Twitter.

These social media platforms encourage and facilitate engagement with other citizens who participate in creating content through commenting, liking, linking, and sharing. This practice is considered to be the 21st century version of individualized citizen journalism. The first wave of this type of citizen journalism came about in the form of amateur news bloggers. These bloggers often created content and narrative that challenged and critiqued the mainstream news outlets. The majority of the content produced by these amateur news bloggers was not actually original content, but curated information that was primarily monitored and edited by these various bloggers.

However, recently there has been a decline in the amateur news blogger due to social media platforms that are much easier to run and maintain. These social media platforms allow individuals to easily share and create and content. Wikimedia Foundation hosts a participatory journalism web site, Wikinews. Citizen journalists also may be activists within the communities they write about.

This has drawn some criticism from traditional media institutions such as The New York Times , which have accused proponents of public journalism of abandoning the traditional goal of objectivity. Many traditional journalists view citizen journalism with some skepticism, believing that only trained journalists can understand the exactitude and ethics involved in reporting news. An academic paper by Vincent Maher, the head of the New Media Lab at Rhodes University, outlined several weaknesses in the claims made by citizen journalists, in terms of the "three deadly E's", referring to ethics, economics, and epistemology.

An analysis by language and linguistics professor, Patricia Bou-Franch, found that some citizen journalists resorted to abuse-sustaining discourses naturalizing violence against women. She found that these discourses were then challenged by others who questioned the gendered ideologies of male violence against women. An article in by Tom Grubisich reviewed ten new citizen journalism sites and found many of them lacking in quality and content.

Also according to the article, the sites with the weakest editorial content were able to expand aggressively because they had stronger financial resources. Another article published on Pressthink examined Backfence, a citizen journalism site with three initial locations in the D. The site recently launched for Arlington, Virginia. However, without more settlers, Backfence may wind up creating more ghost towns. David Simon , a former Baltimore Sun reporter and writer-producer of the popular television series, " The Wire ," criticized the concept of citizen journalism—claiming that unpaid bloggers who write as a hobby cannot replace trained, professional, seasoned journalists.

An editorial published by The Digital Journalist web magazine expressed a similar position, advocating to abolish the term "citizen journalist", and replacing it with "citizen news gatherer". There is either a fire line or police line, or security, or the Secret Service who allow them to pass upon displaying credentials vetted by the departments or agencies concerned. A citizen journalist, an amateur, will always be on the outside of those lines.


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Imagine the White House throwing open its gates to admit everybody with a camera phone to a presidential event. While the fact that citizen journalists can report in real time and are not subject to oversight opens them to criticism about the accuracy of their reporting, news stories presented by mainstream media also misreport facts occasionally that are reported correctly by citizen journalists. Journalism has been affected significantly due to citizen journalism.


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This is because citizen journalism allows people to post as much content as they want, whenever they want. In order to stay competitive, traditional news sources are forcing their journalist to compete. This means that journalist now have to write, edit and add pictures into their content and they must do so at a rapid pace, as it is perceived by news companies that it's essential for journalist to produce content at the same rate that citizens can post content on the internet.

This is hard though, as many news companies are facing budget cuts and cannot afford to pay journalists the proper amount for the amount of work they do. Edward Greenberg, a New York City litigator, [60] notes higher vulnerability of unprofessional journalists in court compared to the professional ones:. On occasion, the protection is dependent on whether the person [who] asserted the claim is in fact a journalist. Cases involving libel often hinge on whether the actor was or was not a member of the "press".

The view stated above does not mean that professional journalists are fully protected by shield laws. In the Branzburg v. Hayes case the Supreme Court of the United States invalidated the use of the First Amendment as a defense for reporters summoned to testify before a grand jury. In , the reporter's privilege of Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper was rejected by the appellate court. Citizen journalism has largely increased during the last decade of the twentieth century and throughout the twenty-first century.

This rise of participation can be associated with the creation of the internet which introduced new ways in communicating and engaging news. Due to this shift in technology, individuals were able to access more news than previously and at a much faster rate. This larger quantity also made it so there was a larger variety of sources which people were able to consume media and news. Natalie Fenton [61] discusses the role of citizen journalism within the digital age and has three characteristics associated with the topic: These characteristics were due to the invention of the internet, which, made way for amateur and citizen journalist to make a name for themselves within the industry.

This was happening throughout the s, however, once the mid s began, the introduction of technologies such as the smartphone increased the ability to access the internet and made it so that individuals were able to use it globally and on the go. With these technological advancements, individuals were able to participate in journalism, like never before. Pictures or videos could be uploaded online in a matter of minutes and this paved the way for social media to grow as a strong producer in the industry.

In , there are a number of different social media platforms through which people can access for their news. Many large corporations have even started to shift their focus onto internet sites, such as Facebook or YouTube and this has also made it easier for the existence of Alternative Media groups to exist. This transition into a digital realm of media has created many new possibilities for people to participate in journalism and it is due to the technological advancements such as the internet and smartphones. As society continues to move forward in a digital age new possibilities in the realm of technology emerge and can be associated with the journalism industry.

New devices such as Virtual Reality , open new avenues, which media companies and people will be able to participate with journalism. As society continues to move towards embracing technology as part of their lives, citizen journalism should increase in accessibility and participation. Dan Gillmor , the former technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News , is one of the foremost proponents [ citation needed ] of citizen journalism and founded a nonprofit, the Center for Citizen Media, [62] to help promote it. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 's French-language television network also has organized a weekly public affairs program called, "5 sur 5", which has been organizing and promoting citizen-based journalism since Jay Rosen , a journalism professor at New York University, was one of public journalism's earliest proponents.

Professor Charles Nesson , William F. One of the leading proponents [ citation needed ] for citizen journalism in Australia is Margo Kingston , author and former political journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald. It was on this site that Kingston published an exclusive story that the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott , had inappropriately claimed expenses for promoting his book.

Maurice Ali, a citizen journalist from Canada, founded one of the first international citizen journalist associations called the International Association of Independent Journalists Inc. The association through its President Maurice Ali have published studies and articles on citizen journalism, attended and spoken at UNESCO [67] and United Nations events [68] [69] as advocates of citizen journalism worldwide. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Not to be confused with Civic journalism. This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. Learn how and when to remove these template messages.

User-generated content

The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. You may improve this article , discuss the issue on the talk page , or create a new article , as appropriate. September Learn how and when to remove this template message. This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions. June Learn how and when to remove this template message. This article needs additional citations for verification.

Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. March Learn how and when to remove this template message. This section needs additional citations for verification. April Learn how and when to remove this template message. A Gift of Fire: Biocybernetic Subversion in Guerrilla Video Primer. Retrieved 21 May The Revolutions will be Blogged: Cyberactivism and the 4th Estate in Egypt.

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Doctoral Dissertation, American University, Retrieved September 8, What is "alternative journalism"? Theory, Practice and Criticism 4, no. Retrieved March 22, Brazilian Journalism Research 2, no. Arab bloggers as citizen journalists Transnational. Fissures in the mediascape: An international study of citizens' media. The Hampton Press Communication Series. Retrieved January 8, The Networked Information Economy". Retrieved January 7, Archived from the original on August 9, Retrieved December 19, Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation, chapter 8.

Some Conclusions from Iran and Egypt". Al Jazeera's key to successful reporting of Arab uprisings". Cyberactivism and the Role of Women in the Arab Uprisings". Occupy Wall Street, Broadcasting Live". Retrieved October 29, — via newsfeed. UC San Diego students. Retrieved 13 September Reaching two billion daily active users in June , Facebook has emerged as the most popular social media platform globally.

However, a concentration phenomenon is occurring globally giving the dominance to a few online platforms that become popular for some unique features they provide, most commonly for the added privacy they offer users through disappearing messages or end-to-end encryption e. WhatsApp , Snapchat , Signal , and Telegram , but they have tended to occupy niches and to facilitate the exchanges of information that remain rather invisible to larger audiences. Production of freely accessible information has been increasing since In January , Wikipedia had more than 43 million articles, almost twice as many as in January This corresponded to a progressive diversification of content and increase in contributions in languages other than English.

In , less than 12 per cent of Wikipedia content was in English, down from 18 per cent in For example, while content on Africa has dramatically increased, a significant portion of this content has continued to be produced by contributors operating from North America and Europe, rather than from Africa itself. It should be remembered that the massive, multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary was exclusively written by user generated content.


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  7. In , Richard Chenevix Trench of the London Philological Society sought public contributions from throughout the English-speaking world for the creation of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. So what we're going to do, if I have your agreement that we're going to produce such a dictionary, is that we're going to send out invitations, were going to send these invitations to every library, every school, every university, every book shop that we can identify throughout the English-speaking world And the point is, the way they do it, the way they will be asked and instructed to do it, is to read voraciously and whenever they see a word, whether it's a preposition or a sesquipedalian monster, they are to Then the quotation, the quotation illustrates the meaning of the word.

    And underneath it, the citation, were it came from, whether it was printed or whether it was in manuscript In the s several electronic bulletin board systems were based on user-generated content. Some of these systems have been converted into websites, including the film information site IMDb which started as rec. With the growth of the World Wide Web the focus moved to websites, several of which were based on user-generated content, including Wikipedia and Flickr The BBC set up a user generated content team as a pilot in April with 3 staff.

    In the wake of the 7 July London bombings and the Buncefield oil depot fire , the team was made permanent and was expanded, reflecting the arrival in the mainstream of the citizen journalist.

    Verification of UGC footage BBC World TV 16/5/13

    After the Buncefield disaster the BBC received over 5, photos from viewers. The BBC does not normally pay for content generated by its viewers. Its rival Fox News Channel launched its project to bring in user-generated news, similarly titled "uReport". This was typical of major television news organisations in —, who realised, particularly in the wake of the London 7 July bombings, that citizen journalism could now become a significant part of broadcast news.

    User-generated content was featured in Time magazine's Person of the Year , in which the person of the year was "you", meaning all of the people who contribute to user generated media such as YouTube and Wikipedia. While the benefit derived from user generated content for the content host is clear, the benefit to the contributor is less direct.

    There are various theories behind the motivation for contributing user generated content, ranging from altruistic, to social, to materialistic. Due to the high value of user generated content, many sites use incentives to encourage their generation. These incentives can be generally categorized into implicit incentives and explicit incentives. The distribution of UGC across the Web provides a high volume data source that is accessible for analysis , and offers utility in enhancing the experiences of end users.

    Social science research can benefit from having access to the opinions of a population of users, and use this data to make inferences about their traits. Applications in information technology seek to mine end user data to support and improve machine-based processes, such as information retrieval and recommendation. However, processing the high volumes of data offered by UGC necessitate the ability to automatically sort and filter these data points according to their value. Determining the value of user contributions for assessment and ranking can be difficult due to the variation in the quality and structure of this data.

    The quality and structure of the data provided by UGC is application-dependent, and can include items such as tags, reviews, or comments that may or may not be accompanied by useful metadata. Additionally, the value of this data depends on the specific task for which it will be utilized and the available features of the application domain. Value can ultimately be defined and assessed according to whether the application will provide service to a crowd of humans, a single end user, or a platform designer. The variation of data and specificity of value has resulted in various approaches and methods for assessing and ranking UGC.

    The performance of each method essentially depends on the features and metrics that are available for analysis. Consequently, it is critical to have an understanding of the task objective and its relation to how the data is collected, structured, and represented in order to choose the most appropriate approach to utilizing it.

    User-generated content - Wikipedia

    The methods of assessment and ranking can be categorized into two classes: Methods emphasizing human-centered utility consider the ranking and assessment problem in terms of the users and their interactions with the system, whereas the machine-centered method considers the problem in terms of machine learning and computation. The various methods of assessment and ranking can be classified into one of four approaches: There are many types of user-generated content: Internet forums , where people talk about different topics; blogs are services where users can post about many topics, product reviews on a supplier website or in social media; wikis such as Wikipedia and Wikia allow users, sometimes including anonymous users, to edit the content.

    Another type of user-generated content are social networking sites like Facebook , Twitter , Instagram or VK , where users interact with other people chatting, writing messages, or posting images or links. Media hosting sites such as YouTube allow users to post content.

    Entertainment media publications include Reddit , 9Gag , 4chan , Upworthy , Inbound. Sites like Tech in Asia and Buzzfeed engage readers with professional communities by posting articles with user-generated comment sections. Net , imageboards ; various works of art , as with deviantArt and Newgrounds ; mobile photos and video sharing sites such as Picasa and Flickr ; customer review sites ; audio social networks such as SoundCloud ; crowd funding , like Kickstarter ; or crowdsourcing.

    Some forms of user-generated content can be considered as a form of citizen journalism. The travel industry, in particular, has begun utilizing UGC throughout their websites to show authentic traveler experiences. Yelp is another example that provides a lot of user generated content on local businesses. According to their website they have a monthly average of 27 million unique users. As of Q4 they have over million reviews. Video games can have fan-made content in the form of mods , fan patches , fan translations or server emulators.

    A popular use of UGC involves collaboration between a brand and a user. The Jib Jab website lets people use their photos of friends and family that they have uploaded to make a holiday video to share across the internet. You cut and paste the faces of the people in the pictures to animated dancing elves. Some brands are also using UGC images to boost the performance of their paid social ads. Some bargain hunting websites feature user-generated content, such as eBay , Dealsplus , and FatWallet which allow users to post, discuss, and control which bargains get promoted within the community.

    Because of the dependency of social interaction, these sites fall into the category of social commerce. Wikipedia , a free encyclopedia, is one of the largest user-generated content databases in the world. Platforms such as YouTube have frequently been used as an instructional aide. Organizations such as the Khan Academy and the Green brothers have used the platform to upload series of videos on topics such as math, science, and history to help aid viewers master or better understand the basics. Educational podcasts have also helped in teaching through an audio platform.

    Personal websites and messaging systems like Yahoo Messenger have also been used to transmit user-generated educational content. There have also been web forums where users give advice to each other. Students can also manipulate digital images or video clips to their advantage and tag them with easy to find keywords then share them to friends and family worldwide.

    The category of "student performance content" has risen in the form of discussion boards and chat logs. Students could write reflective journals and diaries that may help others. Flickr is a site in which users are able to upload personal photos they have taken and label them in regards to their "motivation". The incorporation of user-generated content into mainstream journalism outlets is considered to have begun in with the BBC's creation of a user-generated content team, which was expanded and made permanent in the wake of the July 7, London bombings.

    Since the mids, journalists and publishers have had to consider the effects that user-generated content has had on how news gets published, read, and shared. A study on publisher business models suggests that readers of online news sources value articles written both by professional journalists, as well as users—provided that those users are experts in a field relevant to the content that they create.

    In response to this, it is suggested that online news sites must consider themselves not only a source for articles and other types of journalism, but also a platform for engagement and feedback from their communities. The ongoing engagement with a news site that is possible due to the interactive nature of user-generated content is considered a source of sustainable revenue for publishers of online journalism going forward. The use of user-generated content has been prominent in the efforts of marketing online, especially among millennials. An increasing number of companies have been employing UGC techniques into their marketing efforts, such as Starbucks with their "White Cup Contest" campaign where customers competed to create the best doodle on their cups.

    The effectiveness of UGC in marketing has been shown to be significant as well. For instance, the " Share a Coke " by Coca-Cola campaign in which customers uploaded images of themselves with bottles to social media attributed to a two percent increase in revenue. Of millennials, UGC can influence purchase decisions up to fifty-nine percent of the time, and eighty-four percent say that UGC on company websites has at least some influence on what they buy, typically in a positive way.

    As a whole, consumers place peer recommendations and reviews above those of professionals. User-generated content used in a marketing context has been known to help brands in numerous ways. There are many opportunities in user generated content. The advantages of UGC is it is a quick, easy way to reach to the masses. Here are some examples:. The term "user-generated content" has received some criticism. The criticism to date has addressed issues of fairness, quality, [43] privacy, [44] the sustainable availability of creative work and effort among legal issues namely related to intellectual property rights such as copyrights etc.

    Some commentators assert that the term "user" implies an illusory or unproductive distinction between different kinds of "publishers", with the term "users" exclusively used to characterize publishers who operate on a much smaller scale than traditional mass-media outlets or who operate for free.

    A better response [ according to whom? Sometimes creative works made by individuals are lost because there are limited or no ways to precisely preserve creations when a UGC Web site service closes down. One example of such loss is the closing of the Disney massively multiplayer online game " VMK ". VMK, like most games, has items that are traded from user to user.

    Many of these items are rare within the game. Users are able to use these items to create their own rooms, avatars and pin lanyard. There are ways to preserve the essence, if not the entirety of such work through the users copying text and media to applications on their personal computers or recording live action or animated scenes using screen capture software, and then uploading elsewhere. Long before the Web, creative works were simply lost or went out of publication and disappeared from history unless individuals found ways to keep them in personal collections.

    Another criticized aspect is the vast array of user-generated product and service reviews that can at times be misleading for consumer on the web. A study conducted at Cornell University found that an estimated 1 to 6 percent of positive user-generated online hotel reviews are fake. Another concern of platforms that rely heavily on user generated content, such as Twitter and Facebook, is how easy it is to find people who holds the same opinions and interests in addition to how well they facilitate the creation of networks or closed groups.