The role of the citizen journalist is clearly here to stay and, with the speed of delivery and monitoring of breaking/trending topics through the social media, this role is only ever likely to be strengthened.
However, this doesn’t mean the end of the line for the professional journalist – a point well made in Jeremy Porter’s recent post. Having trained and worked as a broadcast journalist, I know that the ability to point a mobile phone in the direction of a major event happening in front of you doesn’t automatically make you a journalist. It creates plenty of informed observers and that is only to be welcomed if, as in the case of Ian Tomlinson’s death during the G20 clashes in London, observational reality can become a conduit to justice.
Major incidents, such as the Paddington rail crash, have plenty of eye witnesses who were only too keen to share their experiences on what was happening – although social media was in its infancy in 1999 when that particular event happened. In that case there were BBC journalists travelling on the trains involved and it was they who called on to provide objective, descriptive and relatively balanced reports at the scene within minutes of the event and in subsequent news bulletins.
Although professional journalists may not always be immediately on hand for every incident, it is a safe assumption that during major, newsworthy events (the Hudson river plane crash being another example), the news-hungry public may turn to citizen journalism social media for their instant gratification, but will still rely on the professionals to undertake the gathering, filtering, editing, summarising and opinion-forming to deliver the ‘bigger picture’.
Long may it continue!
