NDM Story #23 - Citizen journalism? Nothing new about that

Citizen journalism? Nothing new about that

Summary:

The Croydon Guardian newspaper is attempting to encourage citizen journalism by allowing readers of the paper to publish their own stories, in the form of a newspaper article, onto their website. This has been done in order to "get even more of (readers') news stories onto (their) websites. However, this article suggests to the readers that this isn't a new occurrence that has only become due to the presence of NDM, but has, in fact, been a method used years ago whereby the local papers contained reports from locals such as a teacher at a school.

My opinion:

In all honesty, I wasn't entirely aware that it was a fairly common procedure for citizen journalism to have taken place pre-social media. However, the method in which this Guardian outlet is promoting digital citizen journalism is, in my opinion, interesting since I haven't seen this type of advertisement before whether online or in a print newspaper article. The closest I've ever seen to this process is an interactive piece where they encourage readers to ask one of the paper's team members a question such as "Dear Deidre." Therefore it was interesting to see that now readers actually get a chance to report their own stories. I think this is a clever technique used by The Guardian since they are able to take advantage of and profit from readers' experiences which means they do not need to pay wages to the readers and are therefore increasing their profits, in the process of producing these stories, for the most part due to the simplicity of uploading items on the web, nowadays.