Posts Tagged ‘Citizen Journalism’

CNN iReport, CNN’s global participatory news community, announced earlier this week that they have surpassed one million registered contributors.

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It’s no surprise that Twitter had something to say about the eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park; after all, the microblogging service has served as a tool for spreading awareness about the #Occupy movement, and has played a crucial role in organizing conversations surrounding #OWS.

On Tuesday morning, more than 200 protesters were arrested and removed from Zuccotti Park in a surprise police raid. Law enforcements were following orders from New York’s Mayor,  Michael Bloomberg, who ordered a “park cleaning” early last week.

Bloomberg said that the occupiers were welcome to exercise their right to protest, though he said their tents and living arrangements in the park had become a “health issue,” and were no longer welcome. Mayor Bloomberg told The New York Times that although New York is a place where you can express yourself, he didn’t feel the occupiers were doing that. What’s more, he said, the protestors and their mock-village have made Zuccotti unavailable to anyone else.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, the movement hasn’t stopped:  thousands on videos, images, and tweets continue to pour in under the #OWS hashtag. Just search #OWS, #OccupyWallStreet, or any of the other hashtags used for the movement and you’ll find thousands of pieces of citizen journalism, like these images, which document the eviction:

This image was captured by @JATayler and circulated by Andrew Katz (@katz) on November 17. Here’s the caption he provides beneath the image:

And then there’s this image, captured by @OccupyWallStNYC:

If a picture is worth a thousand word, then this image says a lot about the control that’s being exercised over the demonstrators. In the image, we can clearly read that this is a shot of  Zuccotti park—a supposedly “public” space. The sign, which clearly reads “open to the public,” is sealed off behind bars, capturing the power-struggle narrative running through the entire story of #Occupy.

And then there’s this video:

While the protestors in New York were being evicted, student demonstrators in California were being pepper sprayed by police officers.

While the examples above are by no means a comprehensive analysis of Twitter’s reaction to the #OWS eviction, the tweets selected demonstrate the general spirit of media being pushed through Twitter under the #OWS hashtag. Almost al of the #OWS citizen media contain the same tropes: cops acting badly, protesters being victimized, and the crowd shouting that one resounding line: “the whole world is watching.”

The whole world is watching, and we’re staying tuned to see what will become of the new arrangements in Zuccotti Park. According to The New York Times, New York police reopened the gates to the park shortly after dark on Tuesday evening to allow 750 people back into the park, single file, and one-by-one. The Times says that people with large backpacks and large amounts of food were turned away.

@Amanda Cosco is a freelance writer, content queen & social media girl genius. To learn more about her, visit her professional blog here.

Instead of asking whether or not we’ve entered the age of citizen journalism—which I think we have— perhaps we need to instead inquire as to how we’re instilling journalistic integrity into the next generation of writers.

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Picture this: you’re browsing around your Facebook homepage, checking on your favorite friends and lovers, tagging yourself in photos from the weekend, when suddenly, you stumble upon a religious group.

You write a comment on the group’s wall, quoting a bible passage or contributing your thoughts to the group’s discussion. You hit enter. Boom—a beautiful moment of social conversation and self-publishing all at once. The comment looms on the screen for a few moments, but then, in the blink of an eye, it vanishes, as if sucked into the vortex of internet oblivion.Facebook censorship may be more common than you think—but is it ‘necessarily’ a bad thing?

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Now that everybody’s cell phone comes equipped with a built-in camera, and now that videos and images are as easily shared as oxygen, the line distinguishing the journalistic photographer and the citizen photographer have never been more blurred.

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Within a matter of hours after the tragic suicide bombing in Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport this afternoon, eyewitness footage was already going up on YouTube, proving yet again the power of citizen journalism.

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YouTube has recently become one of the most popular mediums for spreading the word about human rights violations around the globe, from the death of female protester Neda Agha-Soltan after last year’s election in Iran to police brutality in Zanzibar and human rights abuses in Russian prisons. But while this influx of amateur footage of human rights violations is certainly giving us a better idea of the inhumanity going on in other parts of the world, I can’t help but wonder whether these snuff-like videos aren’t desensitizing us to these atrocities. The more videos we see of people being killed, beaten and treated like animals the less shocking it is. Is human rights citizen journalism desensitizing us?
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Over the last few months, YouTube has been putting more and more emphasis on the idea of citizen journalism via YouTube. They rolled out the CitizenTube News Feed earlier this summer and yesterday they announced that they have joined forces with the local Bay Area ABC station to launch a new project, the ABC7 uReport powered by YouTube. That’s right – if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area you are invited to document the news and your video may be featured on Channel 7!
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These days it seems that more and more of our news is being delivered via citizen journalism, including amateur video clips on the Web and postings on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. YouTube sees a lot of potential for broadcasting breaking news from citizen journalists around the world and is testing out a new YouTube News Feed this summer to bring news reporting into the hands of YouTube users. YouTube could potentially revolutionize the way we consume news, bringing citizen journalists to the forefront when it comes to broadcasting what is going on around the world.
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