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through reports on Twitter and Flickr. There were questions raised, however, that by broadcasting their tweets, people may have been putting their own and others’ lives at risk. It was on Twitter again that the story of the
Hudson River plane crash on January 15th 2009 was broken to the world. With a dramatic picture of a plane half sinking in the river, and passengers crowded on the wing awaiting rescue Janis Krun tweeted: There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy. The picture is still available on Twitpic,
under ‘Janis Krun’s tweet.’ While national news organisations quickly swung into action, it was the citizen journalist, empowered by social networking sites, that first broke the story.
So who’s keeping the gate? Are the gatekeepers still fulfilling their old
function of deciding what is and isn’t news, and what will and won’t be broadcast? In some ways, yes. You can send in as much UGC to the major news organisations as you want, with no guarantee that any of it will ever be aired. In fact, last year a BBC spokesperson reported that a large proportion of photos sent in to the news unit were of kittens. While this may represent the interest of the audience, or users, it still doesn’t turn the fact that your kitten is really cute into ‘news.’ The way around the gatekeepers is with the independent media on the web. The
58 MediaMagazine | December 2009 | english and media centre
blogosphere, for example, provides an opportunity for independent, often minority and niche views and news to reach a wide audience. In fact uniting disparate people in ‘micro- communities’ is one of the web’s greatest abilities. How else would all those ice fans communicate without the ‘Ice Chewers Bulletin Board?’ And the only place for those who like to see pictures of dogs in bee costumes is, of course, ‘
Beedogs.com: the premier online repository for pictures of dogs in bee costumes.’ On a more serious note, the change in the landscape of the news means that groups who had little access to self-representation before, such as youth groups, low income groups, and various minority groups may, through citizen journalism, begin to find that they too have a voice.
What about the
professionals? Do journalists fear for their jobs now everyone
is producing content? It is likely that in future there will be fewer and fewer permanent trained staff at news organisations, leaving a smaller core staff who will manage and process UGC from citizen journalists, sometimes known as ‘crowd sourcing.’ Some believe that the mediators and moderators might eventually disappear too, leaving a world where the media is, finally, unmediated. This does raise concerns however. Without moderation sites could be overrun by bigots or fools, by those who shout loudest, and
those who have little else to do but make posts The risk of being dominated by defamatory or racist or other hate-fuelled content raises questions about unmoderated content: ‘free speech’ is great as long as you agree with what everybody is saying! If there will be fewer jobs for trained
journalists, will there also be less profit for the big institutions? This seems unlikely. Although how to ‘monetarise’ UGC – how to make money for both the generator and the host of the content – is still being debated, bigger institutions have been buying up social networking sites for the last few years. Rather than launch their own challenge, they simply buy the site. Flickr is now owned by Yahoo!, YouTube was bought by Google, Microsoft invested in Facebook, and News Corp., owned by Murdoch, bought MySpace. There is a whole new world out there. With
it comes new responsibility. There is enormous potential to expand our view of the world and our understanding of what is happening. Our collective knowledge, and wisdom, should grow. On the other hand, in twenty years time, the news could be overrun by pictures of people’s kittens and a few bigots shouting across message boards at each other.
Sara Mills teaches Media Studies at Helston Community College, Cornwall, and is an AQA examiner.
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