The Zing of Authencity

When listening to the podcast between Alex Goldman and Brooke Gladstone, I couldn't help but think to myself all the times I was on twitter, or any social network for that matter and see information that pertained to something that was in close proximity of me. It seems that the average citizen sometimes breaks news before the actual news networks, that would be considered a part of citizen journalism. Citizen journalism would be defined as the collection, dissemination, and analysis of news and information by the general public, especially by means of the internet. Now, it is very true that it seems that citizen's journalism is on the uprising with such social networks. Can we consider twitter an official replacement to the actual news network? The answer would be no, at least to an article by Pew Research Center. Now more people are on twitter but in 2012 it was noted that less than 10% actually used the news recommendations on twitter, but the there is about a third that go directly to the news organization website or search news often or even have an app. Now, how their news is received is also different, because as of 2012 70% of people said they got their links about news from Facebook and a little over a third said they got it from twitter. But it is still growing, there is forever a positive to having twitter and the zing is possess.

Now it probably won't happen overnight when you are a twitter sensation but these are The Top 10 reason why citizen journalist should use twitter. Because you will find more about the things you are interested in. The simplicity of it all. I mean twitter has something for everyone, me personally I am a huge sports fanatic. And because of that I literally follow almost every sports account that is linked with ESPN. Now I also have a bleacher report app, that kind of has the same thing but I have noticed that sometimes twitter will have news before Bleacher Report and then Bleacher Report would have breaking news before ESPN. But, with this like Goldman said, its a thrill breaking news first, just being the first one to know something. Its a milestone, almost like bragging rights that you broke the news first.

There are negatives as well as positives about citizen journalism, especially with twitter, besides all the drama it is just having the credibility of proving the story right. That is really the biggest question now when "breaking news" seems to leak on twitter, how liable is the source that tweeted what just happened. I mean just like it was discussed on the podcast, a good amount of times it is just bits and pieces of the story. Or you could have the whole story from everything and come to find out it was wrong, like how they explained with the suspect of the Boston Bombing. Definitely very misleading and actually sets back, at least I believe, from what is actually going on.

Twitter will never die, unless some other amazing social work came to make it obsolete, but it has made citizen journalism rise but also credibility go down to a certain extent. The zing is the thrill people go through to try and get everything and be the first to break news.