citizen Journalism

RESPONSE TO "CENSORS COME CALLING" by Lisa Murray

In Censors come calling printed on the 23rd September 2006 by Lisa Murray, i have provided a response to the facts that are present in the article. 

1. "in some countries loose talk is banned and many are punished for their ideas" 

Yahoo once said "China should not punish people for expressing their political views on the Internet". Many people in china are punished for the simple action of creating a blog and expressing their true ideas. As mentioned in the "Censors come calling" article china employs 30,000 Internet censors to track down dissidents and block unauthorised websites. In china they have the most sophisticated filtering system. When only searching for a simple word that breaches the Internet laws, computers with freeze or the page will be redirected to a blank one. 

2. "so called war on terrorism has justified the increasing use of the Internet for surveillance" 

A wide range of blogs have been created that are based on anti-terrorism and terrorism its self in general.  Censorship on these blogs in some countries have stopped the true ideas on terrorism to be expressed. In some countries such as Egypt many people were jailed due to the genuine expression towards terrorism posted on their blogs. 

3. " Amnesty international recently released a report condemning google, yahoo!, and Microsoft for limiting freedom of expression in china" 

Yahoo has been repeatedly attacked because they have handed over emails to the Chinese government that have led to the jail of Chinese censor search results due to the strict censorship in china. Google is criticized for their decision to  on their new Chinese site, though they are given a bit of credit for informing users when search results have been altered. Microsoft is best known part in censorship involves blogs on MSN spaces, where the company has agreed to prevent words like "democracy" from appearing in blog titles or content. 

Censorship and the suppression of speech in many countries has banned citizen journalism completely. The expression of speech has been banned to the point where its illegal and a major crime. 

Citizen Journalism

In class comm315, production skills the main topic of study that we are focused on at the moment is citizen journalism. This blog provides an understanding on what citizen journalism is.

So what is citizen journalism? From my understanding citizen journalism is individuals with no previous journalistic experience and with no professional journalism training can use the tools of the internet and modern technology to create a reason or an in depth analysis of facts in the media. This can also be in association with others information and analysis.
Citizen journalism can also be a regarded as community news as information online with contributions written by users and readers. Basically citizen journalism can be as simple as an everyday individual taking a photo of a media worthy event or happening and distribute it as news.
There are many professional journalists that aren’t the biggest fans of citizen journalism itself because its viewed as a threat to professional journalism. Many journalists have spent years learning and analysing the art of journalism and are not ready to accept information ad analysis from citizen journalists. Another reason why they are viewed as threatening is because they make obvious the bias in other network news and professional reporter news.

Citizen Journalism