Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog! This week in class we discussed blogs and how some people rather take advice from a blogger than a professional on different subjects. Let's jump right in!
I want to start this week's blog off with an exercise. Close your eyes and think about 3 different types of blogs that you have come across. Now that you think of them determine how they differ. Do you read blogs for entertainment purposes or to gain deeper understandings of a subject that you are passionate about or concerned about? Personally, I invest my time reading 3 types of blogs.
- cooking
- celebrity news
- scholarly
I love to cook so I gravitate towards cooking blogs for new recipes. I must admit I love reading about celebrity gossip because I find it interesting. Lastly, I gravitate towards scholarly journals for school. I will say that sometimes I prefer reading a blog over a news article. I feel like bloggers do a good job creating content that connects with their audience. I feel like I have a relationship with the blogger whose content that I am reading. I feel more connected with the blogger and it makes me want to come back. I feel like sometimes now some people view the news media as being "biased" so when someone finds a blogger that they feel connects with them and their views it may draw them closer.
Citizen Journalism
What is Citizen Journalism?
Citizen journalism is defined as journalism that is conducted by people who are not professional journalists who spread information using websites, blogs, and social media. Because our world has become more digital than ever, citizen journalism has expanded its influence worldwide. Questions remain on whether citizen journalists should be trusted or if we should use their information as reliable sources. I believe that citizen journalism is important. "Citizen journalism has played a major role in 21st century political events."The website Twitter established itself as an emerging outlet for the dissemination of information during the protests following the Iranian presidential election in June 2009." (Britannica n.p.) For example, I have seen on social media where one of my friends had witnessed something that was newsworthy and a news station had commented under their post asking if they could use their pictures or videos. To a certain extent, I believe that citizen journalists are a reliable source of information as long as they have established their credentials early on. For example, I established the purpose of my blog and my credentials in my first posting so that people could know who I am, the purpose of my blog, etc. Do you all believe that you can trust the information that the blogs you read put out?
Remember when I said that I like reading blogs about celebrity gossip? The majority of those blogs thrive off of citizen journalists. There is no way that the creators of those blogs are able to capture the pictures and information that they gain from celebrities. They receive pictures and information from individuals like you and me and they post them so that "we" can stay in the loop of the lives of our favorite celebrities. When I look and read blogs on information from school I make sure to look up other sources using our universities library database to help make the information that's in the blog stronger. I look at the sources that they include in their postings and once I do that I can deem whether or not the blog is reliable or not.
What do you all think? Is citizen journalism vital in our digital world? Do we think it makes it harder for us to find trustworthy and reliable information? Let me know in the comments!
See you all online next week!
Hi Makayla,
ReplyDeleteI definitely believe that citizen journalism is vital in our digital world, and I agree with your statement about how most of the information we find is from people who are there at the moment. It think it’s cool that everyday individuals are providing so much content to different blogs and news outlets, as it makes it more personable for us as the readers. I definitely believe it makes it harder to find trustworthy and reliable information, because the “newsworthy” information that we are looking at can be doctored or altered by someone that has the same access as the professional journalists and it could just be someone that is possibly voicing their opinion so it’s not even a fact. So, I definitely think it is harder to find trustworthy information that we can report on or that we can deliver to someone else. That’s how it becomes more of a dialogue and open discussion which is important, however not everything that is stated is a fact. Which can also start to play into people’s emotions and not the actual facts that we need to have those proper discussions. It definitely makes it hard to decipher between emotions and logic when you’re having conversations about news so it is definitely important to fact check everything and verify that the sources are reliable. But it is interesting to see how the world is shaping because of citizen journalism so I’m definitely looking forward to see how everything plays out within the next couple of years as strategic communicators. I hope your semester is going well! I loved your blog post and I too indulge in cooking and entertainment blogs (maybe a little too much lol). I can’t wait to see your next post!
Brianna Etienne-Thompson