Citizen Journalism Exercise
Posted by ptobin on April 22, 2008
NowPublic is a citizen journalism site which dedicates itself to news on a global level. The question as to whether or not it is ‘proper’ journalism is interesting in that the featured stories on the homepage are listed as the top five crowd powered stories of the past 24 hours yet they are hardly news at all.
There is, further down the page, lists of news by section which is more along the lines of proper news and there is a ‘local’ section which gives news according to your location. This works as proper journalism yet the content isn’t always as ‘newsy’ as one might expect.
There is a danger that, on this website in particular, people are simply prioritising the gossipy or celebrity stories and for a website that purports itself to be a news site this is misleading.
It doesn’t seem that this site adds to the news in any particular fashion if someone is simply accessing the site for headlines. They can be found on this site but only if you go digging.
