In the wake of huge catastrophic events such as the London bombings, the tsunami in Southeast Asia, 9/11, the recent Air France plane crash at Pearson International Airport and countless others, a pattern has begun to emerge in the media.

The funny thing is- the media this time seems to be coming from ordinary people (non-practicing journalists) taking on the role of reporter and photographer instead of just an eye-witness.

Are citizens becoming the new media? And if so, what implications does this have and how does it affect the news that is being presented to the public?

After the terrorist plane crashed into the World Trade Centre, September 11, 2001, dozens of photos, footage and written eye-witness accounts began popping up everywhere from newspapers, television, magazines and the Internet.

When the London Underground suicide attacks occurred on July 7, murky photos taken by passengers on the Underground trains were on the front cover of major newspapers such as the Times of London and the Guardian. In the United States, photos snapped by cell phones were captured on CNN, ABC News and Fox News.

More recently with the Air France plane crash at Pearson International Airport, newspapers were asking witnesses to send in their photographs and stories. The Toronto Star even asked on August 2, ?Do you have photos of the incident? Email them to us here?. In a later update, they ask for stories as well.
And the Star benefited greatly from the submissions, even posting clear and up-close photos of the crash; photos that no Star photographer caught. Or if they did, they weren?t showing them on the website.

Despite criticism (In North America, at least) for not being real journalism, bloggers are posting photos as well as eye-witness accounts.

But are blogs really different from a newspaper website? There is of course the argument that blogs are not edited, but Stephen Glass proved that no one was editing or fact checking the New Republic, and Jayson Blair proved that no one was doing likewise for the New York Times.
Blogs give readers the opportunity to read honest, moving stories that they might not find in the sometimes stale newspaper story.

MSNBC.com even has a section called ?Citizen Journalist? that asks for witnesses of big news events to send videos, photos and stories of their experiences.

Accepting eye-witness accounts is not really new; newspapers do sometimes accept photos from people during tragic events that their professional on-staff photographers missed, but never before has there been such a high demand for citizen journalism.

It?s clear that increasingly, there is a need for amateur journalists when the pros aren?t around where the action is. Even though they most likely do not have formal training or experience in photography or journalism, their contributions are valuable to the media for that reason. The photos and story are real, raw and powerful. These amateurs don?t conform to a certain house style, they don?t have expectations put on them from an editor.

The big question is: Will there be a need for professional journalists?

In a time where readers are questioning the so-called ?objectivity? that journalists claim to have, citizen journalism is on the rise because it seems more real and passionate than what pro journalists are writing about today.

Maybe the category of ?professional journalist? will phase out and the media will only be comprised of editors and fact checkers. A newspaper could end up very embarrassed if they publish a fake news story or a photo-shopped photograph.

It is an encouraging thought that newspapers are changing the way news is presented and shifting the boundaries between what is ?real? and citizen journalism. Whether pro journalists will be left without a job is questionable but by publishing stories and other media by non-journalists, the notion of traditional journalism has changed, for the better.






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