Citizen Journalism is also known by many as public, participatory, democratic, or street journalism.  The modern citizen journalist movement really began during the 1988 US Presidential election when journalist became part of the public journalism movement as a countermeasure against the growing distrust of the news media and public disillusionment with politics.  Early citizen journalism projects were often expensive and time-consuming as they were “special projects.”  With today’s technology, however, citizen journalism has really began to take off as most average Americans have the ability to capture news and instantly distribute it globally.

The true idea of citizen journalism is for the public to use technology to capture news and distribute it via the internet or other sources to create, fact check, change media of their own or together with others.  With all the social network sites, blogs, and other internet sources it is easy to see why citizen journalism is such a large part of the media today.  In “What is Participatory Journalism”  J.D. Lasica classified citizen journalism into six different types.  1) Audience Participation:  Personal user comments attached to news stories, blogs, video from mobile phones uploaded to the internet, etc.

2) Independent news and information Websites such as the Drudge Report and Consumer Reports. The Drudge Report 3) Full Fledged Participatory News Sites:  NowPublic.com, digitialjournal.com, and ground report

4) Collaborative and contributory media sites:  Slashdot and Newsvine  5) “Thin Media”:  Email, newsletters, and mailing lists  6)  Personal broadcasting sites:  video broadcast sites such as KenRadio or any podcasts.

With the boom of the internet in the late 1990s and the early 2000s citizen journalism really began to emerge as a leading media source.  In 2001, ThemeParkInsider.com became the first online publication to win a major journalism award for a feature that was reported and written entirely by readers.  In February of 2003, iBrattleboro.com was launched in Brattleboro, VT and was one of the first citizen-written news sites in the US.  AssociatedContent.com was launched in 2004, claiming the be the “People’s Media Company” and were the first to offer compensation for those who published quality content on their site.  Since then similar news websites have launched including, WorldVoiceNews.com and AllVoices.com.  Blogging recently has also became a huge form of citizen journalism.  In fact, in 2004 during the Presidential election both the Democratic and Republican parties issued press credentials to citizen bloggers covering the conventions.  A recent trend in citizen journalism has become “hyperlocal journalism.”  This is a form of journalism where online news sites invite contributions from local residents of their subscription areas, who will often report on topics that most local conventional newspapers tend to ignore and topics that might be considered controversial.

With technology only continuing to grow and get bigger and better it’s easy to assume that citizen journalism will only continue to grow as well.  In fact citizen journalism’s future may be based off of not just the internet but also mobile phones.  Moments after 9-11 some of the first live images outside of the network news shots were those being taken on cameras and videos from phones.  Social networking is also part of the future of citizen journalism as more and more people update their statuses on facebook and “twitter” the latest happenings.  In fact during the Iranian President election protests this year twitter played a large part of reporting after foreign reports were banned.  As blogging continues to grow more and more in the 18-35 year old bracket rely on blogs as a primary news source.

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No matter where technology takes us it will inevitably lead to even more public participation and citizen journalism.