Who's the Hero? The Power Struggle Between Citizen & Professional Journalists
When discussing the role of, what has been deemed, “the citizen journalist,” I can’t seem to help myself from thinking about Spiderman, of all things. This might sound crazy. However, it will undoubtedly answer the question, “Who reports the news best: a citizen with a phone and twitter, or a professional journalist?”
Let me explain. Everyone knows the story of Spiderman, the superhero pseudonym for Peter Parker. If you’ll recall, Peter Parker landed a job with the Daily Bugle, a fictional newspaper headed by the sometimes evil publisher, John Jonah Jameson. Parker became a star photographer after it seemed that he was always at the scene of the crime to photograph Spiderman in action. Unbeknownst to Jameson the whole time that Parker actually was Spiderman. The moral of the story: the closer you are to the source, the better you are able to report the news.
The Spiderman example is just meant to show that no matter what, when reporting the news, it is how close you are able to get to the source that makes it newsworthy. This is why I believe that citizen journalists have found success. It is not new or groundbreaking that citizens on the street are the first to watch news happen. However, they only now have the tools to broadcast their experiences via social media. This comes with a certain red tape as well. People on the street do not necessarily have experts behind them fact-checking all of their tweets or posts. Yet, I believe that it is the responsibility of the news consumer to always cross-check information for credibility. An example comes to mind from Shattered Glass, a documentary about Stephen Glass, a reporter who was found to have lied and falsified sources countless times in order to produce stories.
So really, all this proves is that you cannot trust anyone. However, that’s an age-old lesson and nothing new. The public is turning more and more to Twitter and Facebook to receive news. However, it is important to check multiple sources at all times, whether that be other twitter accounts or websites like CNN or BBC for example. I think that eventually, the two worlds will collide between professional and citizen journalists. In today’s fast-paced environment, people want their news as quickly as possible and are not willing to wait. Therefore, professional journalists will have to adapt and may even become more so fact-checkers for citizen journalists or maybe even “curators” of news gathered through social media. Whatever it may be, social media has definitely changed the face of news reporting, for better or for worse. As these two forces continue to battle, we will find out just who the hero and the villain are when it comes to citizen vs. professional journalists. Until then, everyone seeking an outlet to report news needs to remembers that, “with great power, comes great responsibility.”
