citizen journalism

Recently, I've come to realize how useful a tool like Twitter is, and then I read Jonathan Nguyen's post, claiming that citizen journalism is not journalism. I thought a journalist was simply someone who keeps a journal. :-)

All joking aside, as a user of software, I couldn't care less if the application, that I am using, has been written in VB, C#, or Python, so long as it gets the job done. The same goes for news: as a consumer of information, I just want to get up-to-the-minute information on the current issue, regardless of whether it was written in leet or in perfect English. In that respect, twitterers sometimes do a much better job at it than official news agencies.

The bottom line is: perhaps it is true that citizen journalism is not journalism, but as an end-user, I don't really care.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Thanh,

Thanks for your thoughts and perhaps you're right. From a consumer of news, does it really matter what we call it but that it's accurate?

Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts.

Thanh Hai Tran said...

Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for your comment. I'm a frequent reader of your blog and am usually in agreement with most of the stuff you that write. They're actually quite good. :-)