Citizen Journalism

What impact are these changes (Citizen Journalism) having on:

News Stories
Citizen Journalism have an impact on news stories as consumers can now produce their own content. For example, the Rodney King incident is a example of Citizen Journalism as the individual is taking the footage on his mobile phone. As a result, this led to a rise in user generate content as people around the world was able to access the video through social networkings sites such as YouTube. In contemporary society, majority of people are citizen journalist or accidental journalist as they film incidents on their phones and upload the videos on social networking sites for people to produce a discussion and socially interact.

News Agenda (the choices of stories that make up the news/news worthy)
Citizen Journalism has an impact on News Agenda, as if a incident is filmed by a individual and results to a moral panic, news providers are more likely to cover that topic as consumers would watch it. As a result, this story will become news worthy as there would be a large mass of audience watching the news. This is because, the audience would want to watch news which is relevant. Notably, if the news agenda is popular amongst the audience, then they are likely to post it on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter which would create a user-generate content. Galtung and Ruge analysed international news stories to find out what factors they had in common, and what factors placed them at the top of the news agenda.

The role of professional in news
As a result of citizen journalism, which has caused a revolution of UGC, means that there would be a fewer amount of trained staff at news organisations. This conveys, that there would be a small staff who have to manage and process UGC from the citizen journalists, which is known as crowded sourcing and therefore there is likely to be a decline in a role of professional in news. Furthermore, there has been concerns held by journalist over the rise of user-generate content about the decline in mediators and moderators. This raises concerns, as without moderators sites can be overrun by fools and if there will be few jobs for trained journalists.