The average Joe Blow....

This weeks reading titled “User-generated content and the changing news cycle” written by Stephen Quinn and Deirdre Quinn-Allan, gives us an insight into the world of a citizen journalist. A citizen journalist can be anyone, any average Joe Blow, all it takes these days is a mobile phone, which in 2009 i can almost safely say everyone has one. The power of a mobile phone, having the technology of a camera, video camera, audio recorder, and the internet gives anyone to become the next walkley award winner..

There are many cases of how street journo's have shaped and influenced news and information. The best most recent example was the London bombings in 2006, which saw some of the victims using there mobile phone to take photos from inside the disaster area, these photos and video footage were then passed on to news outlets all over the world and the footage was then showed live to the globe.









With technology giving us this opportunity, the role of a journalist is rapidly changing, we saw from last week how convergence has changed the newsroom into a multimedia world. But citizen journalism has meant that its not always the paid news outlets that are breaking stories but rather anyone who can write a blog, record a podcast or even update their twitter account.

So what does this mean for newspapers? Well they become redundant? A thing of the past? In my opinion, yes, there gone. With the new age of social media upon us, the average Joe can get his news from anywhere, whether it be through a twitter feed or an online newspaper such as crickey.com.au, its everywhere. Plus how many trees does it cost to produce a daily newspaper? The daily paper is something that has all but gone from our lives.

I will finish by repeating what i said in my last post, gone are the days were a journalist specialised in a particular field (IE print or broadcast), now days a journo must have the ability to reach his/her audience on every different medium.

This is just a part of multimedia and the new world of journalism.

LG
Robbie