Citizen Journalism Is Liberation

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Citizen Journalism is liberation To first understand the statement, citizen Journalism is liberation, it is best to have the sentence broken down by explaining the key terms which are citizen journalism and liberation. In this essay, I will first establish what citizen journalism is then move on to liberation and explain how citizen journalism came about, what compelled it then I will make judgements as to whether citizen Journalism is Liberation or not. Bowman and Willis (2003) describes Citizen Journalism as a concept of members of the public, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information. They further argue that it should not be confused with community journalism or civic journalism, which are both practiced by professional journalists. According to the two authors, Citizen Journalism should also not be confused with collaborative journalism, which is practiced by professional and non-professional journalists working together. When describing a citizen journalist on the other hand, Bainbridge, Goc and Tynan (2008) describes it as a member of the public who acts in the role of a journalist gathering news and new information (including images), which are communicated to an audience. Oxford dictionary explains the meaning of Liberation as the act of setting someone free from imprisonment, slavery, or oppression the other explanation which for the purpose of this paper I will choose to use is freedom from limits on thought or behaviour which carries an example that says the struggle for women’s liberation. Citizen Journalism is not something that one can says is new as history shows that it has always been there through the years. Bainbridge, Goc and Tynan (2008) argue that there has always been citizen journalism in the broad sense, people who have used a public forum to
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