Citizen journalism way ahead for the media

Chatting with Perumal Venatesan, fondly known as Pee-Vee, an account director who also runs Bangalore Weekend Shoots, on citizen journalism and its future in the Indian media was an eye-opener.

Pee-Vee feels the future of any form of media -- online, social, print and even advertising -- is going to be 'crowd journalism'. "Citizens' contribution will give us much-needed variety of choice. We may not be able to get everything from professionals," he says.

I looked at Wipro's official website, which changes its homepage picture once every 10 days, and was impressed by their innovative, forward-looking initiative 'crowdsourcing'. Essentially, the company asks page viewers to decide on their homepage theme. Visitors to the Wipro Technologies homepage will be provided with an option to vote for their preferred homepage. The option with the maximum number of votes will be chosen.

Statistics on Indian citizen journalism show that four out of 10 educated people in India contribute to a citizen journalism portals across the globe. It does not stop there: a country that took to the tech-age much later than the USA or Europe also boasts of a large number of citizen journalism portals, for example Merinews.com, Whitedrums.com, Mynews.in, South Asian Citizen Reporters Network (Sacrn.com), Purdafash.com and Calcuttacentral.com. There are even rural citizen journalists who contribute to portals like Merikhabar.com and Janataadalat.com.

There are four ways in which citizen journalism has grown with the help of the blogging community. Apart from text, news aggregation and comment blogs, there's photo-blogging (on sites like Flickr), video-blogging (on sites like YouTube) and micro-blogging (on sites like Twitter).

Well, what is citizen journalism? It is news created by amateur reporters who were previously seen as the audience and remain so even now in the form of viewers or readers. The root of citizen journalism lies in self-printed pamphlets that were once distributed by the street-side. By enabling everyone to report without the interference of gatekeepers such as editors, social media has democratised journalism and enriched it by bringing in a diversity of views and voices.

The difference between Western citizen journalism and its Indian counterpart, according to me, is the fact that the former seems more attuned to neighbourhood and celebrity gossip, while the latter focuses on serious developmental issues such as climate change, health, science, politics, the environment or social problems.

Michael Zelbel, a content and visual citizen journalist from Germany, says, "Citizen journalism will transform social media interaction and distribution, which in a way will be through word-of-mouth online media and through a string of friends who inform and update."

Zelbel also feels that newspapers and magazines, which constitute the print medium, have to create space for citizen journalism efforts since this will build a community base, which they can cater to and build as potential long-term readers. Indian newspapers should develop dedicated citizen journalism pages - something that will put them far ahead of their counterparts in the West.