Love it or hate it - citizen journalism here to stay

After all how can anyone who hasn't been formally trained call themselves a journalist? Don't they know the long hours and back-breaking toil that goes into 'paying your dues' before your byline is deemed good enough to grace the pages of a publication, or be aired on the electronic media?

Here to stay?

Well, like it or not, citizen journalists, trained or not, are here to stay... Do they add real value to news? Well, let's take a look at what's happening in Egypt right now.

Here the highly credible and world-class station Al Jazeera has been banned along with three other media outlets. And this isn't the first time we've seen such media blackouts in this part of the world. So who does that leave to tell the story? The people on the ground with cell phones who can take pictures and tell stories of what's going on around them, that's who.

I have friends right now covering stories in this part of the world and they've been told if they want to stay alive they must walk with their backs to the buildings, out of view of snipers. So once, where a press jacket would protect you, now even a bullet-proof vest doesn't always work. An ordinary Egyptian with a cellphone, however, can have carte blanche to tell the story!

The downside

Reporting in war zones however isn't quite as glamorous as movies make out and since the Arab Spring in late 2010 Reporters Sans Frontiers' (Reporters Without Borders) research shows 68 citizen journalists and a new breed called netizens' lives have been lost. To put this in perspective that's 70% of all Syrian media-related deaths! War reporters aren't just whipped out of a newsroom, given a camera and tape recorder and sent randomly in to report. They're trained to not only get the story but to come out alive...

Verification is essential

Each day in a newsroom stories come in that sometimes sound so whacky they can't be true - but sometimes they are. If you have the resources of a newsroom you check these stories out. Just last week I was in the EWN newsroom when the news editor got an SMS saying two dead pythons were found in a house in Hyde Park.

After we all went eewww it was decided to check the validity of the story out thoroughly. Within minutes this was found to be a hoax and no reporter was sent out.

This is a light issue but very often citizen journalists or netizens can pick a story and flood the internet with what appears to be a genuine story but in fact is misinformation. You only need to look at the story about Madiba returning home last week to see that not only was this wrong but it was picked up and run on major media stations worldwide.

During Hurricane Sandy in the United States misinformation by citizen journos gave rise to wholesale panic and mayhem in the community. No-one had bothered to check or research the information first.

Yes, I can hear some of you saying 'but the media also stuffs up' and I couldn't agree more, they do - but then there are the right channels to censor them. With citizen journalism there's no recourse for mistakes!

Hiding behind a Twitter tag

And then there's the situation where you can post online as whoever you fancy. A hashtag and off you go. Want to be Jacob Zuma or God forbid wee Julius, there's not much to stop you and before you know it you're trending! There was a great story a couple of years ago of an American mayor, Mike Winder of Utah, who, for two years, used a fake name and wrote 'good news' stories to promote his small town of West Valley, just outside Salt Lake City. He even created a Facebook page for his alter ego, Richard Burwash... Scary stuff.

The good news

Whichever way you look at it there can't be a journalist to record every important happening wherever it may happen. And although there are comments such as "I wouldn't want to be operated on by a 'citizen surgeon' or have my plumbing fixed by a 'citizen plumber' the fact is that very often photos, videos and tweets from ordinary people are proving invaluable and expanding news coverage.

Social media is here to stay - and will get bigger and hopefully even better. Let's just hope it doesn't get too abused.