Evidently, the blogosphere and its related activities has not only grown but truly exploded: in December Yahoo launched YouWitnessNews, CNN features ‘I-Report’, the Canadian news site NowPublic claims over 60,000 contributing reporters, and Reddit and Digg have been successful because they allow users to customize and rank their news. Even newspapers, which were once skeptical about the new competition, now embrace and promote citizen contributions within their offerings.

"Citizen journalism is something that is taking off huge at newspapers and all levels of journalism," said Mark Fitzgerald, an editor-at-large for leading news industry publication Editor and Publisher.

Amidst this overwhelming embrace of new media though, its negatives are often ignored. More importantly, they are often ignored by those most concerned – citizens and bloggers.

One of the problems comes from simple ignorance of professional media and news-related practices.

"The downside, and it's a big downside, is a lot of these people have no exposure to media practices -- laws and fundamentals of sound and responsible news reporting," said Christine Tatum, president of the US Society of Professional Journalists.
   
"People trespass, make promises they don't keep for information, receive kickbacks, don't give someone the right to fair reply. These are huge no-noes."

Another problem is that, unlike bloggers’ claims, numbers don’t necessarily create force, and even less so accuracy. A few specialized experts can often do more in-depth and objective work than a herd of people who are emotionally biased about a particular topic.

"Ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule, on steroids," says Andrew Keen, author of a book titled "Cult of the Amateur."

"It is a big bad case of everybody thinking they can do someone else's job better than they can," said Tatum.

This, of course, isn’t to ridicule new media, and even less to unilaterally criticize them. Far from that, bloggers and citizen journalists, who are now an essential part of the media landscape, must realize the limitations of their own medium, in order to improve quality journalism.

Source: AFP Mail