As a journalist, I cannot be entirely objective about citizen journalism- for starters, I don’t think citizen journalism should be allowed to be considered journalism as all. Although non-journalists have certainly contributed to the production of news, should they be called journalists? A more proper term, I think, for these passionate people, would be “news watchers” or something that has a slighter stronger nuance than “tipster.”<\/p>\n
The reason I think these people should not be considered journalists is because journalists are supposed to adhere to facts, and while complete objectivity is hard to achieve, journalists have a moral obligation (or in many cases, news rooms have strict guidelines) to be fair.<\/p>\n
Groundless rumors, however, generated on the Internet, are making their way into mainstream news without proper filtering. From malicious posts about celebrities<\/a> to possible manipulations of the stock market (as seen in the latest rumor of Steve Jobs<\/a>) people are out there writing all kinds of weird stuff. But publishing it on their blog is one thing- publishing it on a news site (or what some organizations claim is a news site) is different. Although I respect generativity and self-regulatory actions on the Web (such as those that can be seen on Wikipedia) news stories can’t wait that long to be confirmed. They should be confirmed before being published.<\/p>\n One reason for this is because now that operations such as stock trading are done by computers, a news story can affect one’s trading without even knowing or reading of the incorrect article. For instance, many people who trade stocks or foreign exchange usually preset a certain percentage so that the computer automatically sells or buys if the share price falls or rises by a certain percent. It’s not even the shareholder who is making a sales decision.<\/p>\n The Apple story in particular was a bit shocking because just two weeks ago in Prof. Lewis’ class, we looked at a case study from 2002 in which United Airlines’ stock was affected by a faulty news story<\/a>. (this wasn’t the fault of a citizen journalist)<\/p>\n