The Rise of Citizen Journalism

 

1.5.- Reading and Use of English Exam Task Part 7: Gapped text.- You are going to read an extract from an article. Six paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (1 – 6) writing it CAPITALS. There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

 

The rise of ‘citizen journalism’	1.5.4.-
Journalists lecture the rest of the would about the importance of change in everything from foreign policy to food labelling. Yet the same journalists dislike change as much as anyone else; their extensive experience of recommending change does not help them to accept it themselves. The fact is that journalists react to digital technology’s disruption of their industry with the same anger as any groups of professionals required to rethink what they do.	The attempt to get at the truth may fail or may fail to be credible. It may involve opinion and analysis as well as reportage so that the truth is understood in depth and significance. It will involve judgements under pressure about truth and public interest. We call this inexact science ‘editing’. Anyone looking at the history of journalism will also notice that the organisations that do it are regularly turned upside down. Two forces do this: first, frustrated journalists who find the habits and the conventions of journalism block all attempts to get at the truth.
1.5.1.-	1.5.5.-
‘Journalism’ came into existence when reliable information was scarce. As newspaper publishing and distribution grew, editors had to satisfy demands for accuracy, as well as entertainment. The effort to be trusted came to be the distinguishing mark of journalism. But printing technology made journalism powerful: a few people gathered, sorted and distributed news and hoped that many people would buy it.	Journalists still gather the basic news, but must also meet the need to give it meaning and context. We analyse news in the context of global conversations that can involve a handful of people or millions. Believers in citizen journalism argue that enforced ‘democratisation’ of media reduces the need for, and therefore the power of the conventional media. The forces of change may bring down media empires that fail to adapt, but they do not destroy the idea of journalism.
1.5.2.-	1.5.6.-
Anyone can now publish their thoughts and their books for free to a global audience. Old fashioned print publishing by the few to the many sits uneasily next to successful ‘peer – to – peer’ networks.	Also the way people sample and use news and opinion is changing: they dip in and out of news al day. But the business of getting accurate basic data to consumers, of building platforms that people trust remains valuable work despite the changing background. Some ‘citizen journalists’ make a real contribution to this; some don’t. It depends who they are. In other words, we’re back where we started: making judgements about accuracy and honesty. The most important question consumers of news and opinion will ask themselves is question they have always asked: do I trust this source to tell me something true and useful?
1.5.3.-
Citizens, helped by democratic technology, can at last bypass and expose these tricks but ‘citizen journalism’ can also simply mean a wider range of sources. Big events that leave media organisations rushing to get to the right spots are now covered by volunteer witnesses who send instant photos and videos from their mobile phones. Where established reporter fears to go – war zones being the obvious example – the voice of the ordinary citizen journalist may be the only believable news source.

 

A.- Against this background, ‘citizenn journalism’ means different things to different citizens. As a movement in media politics, citizen journalists would like to replace ‘conventional media’, arguing that the claims made by journalists for the trustworthiness of their work are a trick, hiding agendas which may belong to big business or government.	D.- It may not be in majority in my line of work, but I like the current technology – driven chaos precisely because journalists have to go back to first principles. Let’s look at the history.
B.- Bloggers have increased the transparency of the established media by exposing errors, and acting as gossip platforms for opinion that would otherwise not circulate so far so fast. These are not all citizens, in the sense of being outside media organisations; many are journalists and many of their sources are journalists.	E.- The need to know the accuracy of what you are reading does not disappear because you have a lot of new ways of finding facts and other points of view. The nature of the news and opinion people now consume is changing: more varied, less formal, often like an everyday conversation.
C.- However, three changes turned this shortage of public information into today’s glut: the invention of radio and television, digital technology such as email, and finally the internet. Digital communications not only increased the amount of easily – reached information but weakened the power of traditional publishing.	F.- The second revolutionary force is technology. Radio and television gave journalism the vivid immediacy it lacked. The blend of wireless telephony, the World Wide Web, and the miniaturization of personal technology has helped to create a glut of news.
	G.- But if is the case that anyone can be a journalist, what is journalism? Whatever the era and technology, it must surely involve an organized attempt to show what is happening, to reduce or eliminate doubt about what is true.