“We The Media” Chapter 7
Nov 11th, 2008 by ariannarana
Chapter 7 discusses the idea of citizen journalism and how the former newsreaders have become the news writers with help from the blogosphere. Glimor talks about the traditional citizen journalists that previously wrote letters to the editor and were engaged and active on a local level. They now write blogs and post on a greater spectrum. The second group Gilmor mentions includes those citizen journalists who take it to the next level with creating websites, SMS and becoming a key source of news for others.
The idea of citizen journalism has deeply progressed since the time this book was published. Take for instance the YourHub section of the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News each week. They run off of citizen journalism, because it is the new trend. Everyone has something to say.
Another point I thought was very interesting was that now, excluding the Media from coverage of something doesn’t mean much, because anyone who attends can simply go online and post or blog about it.
Here, I think the blogospher is taken pretty lightly in comparison to the countries where free speech is not a right. Gilmor notes that in those countires, the blogospher is much more serious and is the “stuff of actual revolutions.”
Gilmor continues and talks about blogs in the Iranian society. I wish we would have asked the students about blogging and the forms of Media they use. If they mostly read the newspaper or watch TV for their news. It would be interesting to see if they have their own blogs, or if they would even say they do since it seemed as if they try to sensor what they say.
Gilmor also mentioned Wikipidia and other alternative Media and the problems with editing and how he hopes it would progress for the future of journalism, but that all seemed a little dated.