The Rise of Citizen Journalism in China

555 Words3 Pages
The Rise of Citizen Journalism in China Citizen journalism is a new trend of journalism in china. Different from that of the civic journalism and professional journalism, the process of carrying out citizen journalism is completed by ordinary people who play the role as non-professional journalists to deliver breaking news and expose social problems from a grassroots perspective via the internet. The development of citizen journalism can be dated back to late 1990s’ and has speeded up since the time of Web 2.0 started in 2005. A big progress of Web 2.0 is that users that were previously only classified as viewers are now able to apply changes and add to the contents of the website . At that time I was twelve years old and the later few years is just the time when the internet as well as I myself grows dramatically. At first my friends and I used QQ to chat online. Then we began to post personal style articles on blogs and online forums. Very soon blogs were replaced by social networks on which we socialize online as in reality. Only after one or two years, the leader of online interaction has been the micro blogs. I believe my adolescence witnesses the whole process of how people’s social life is relying more and more on the internet and how online public opinion is rising. Given an equal platform that everyone can let out their voice, people began to relate their expression to public life and these expressions combine into online public opinion. In 2007, Zhou Shuguang became the first one known by the public who intended to report social issues via personal online channel. He interviewed the owners of “the coolest nail house” and uploaded videos taken by his cell phone to his blog. He became the first known citizen journalist. In such cases, we can reflect that citizen journalists can do what traditional media are not able to do. No matter how hard the
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