Citizen Journalism Vs Tabloid-P2

Citizen Journalism is when the general public contribute to the news, with web 2.0 technologies this can be done in many different forms. Due to the availability of citizen Journalism the phrase “Prosumer” was coined to describe when someone takes the role of both producer and consumer.

One-way average consumers can interact with news is through the comments section, most online platforms today have a comment section that is available to all, here you can post thoughts on particular threads and articles, comments work especially well with news as it gives people the opportunity to share their opinion on particular stories as well as have discussions with other commenters which gets people more involved with today’s news. A comment section is a very popular feature to online posts and appears most commonly on social media platforms. Social media is another form of citizen journalism, the best example is Twitter, Twitter allows you not only to follow news providers such as BBC news, but you can also retweet, share, comment and @ people to show your opinion or share news with your followers as all of these things will appear on your follower’s feeds. So Citizen Journalism not only allows anyone to report the news it also helps with the distribution of news. With so many news providers existing today it can be hard to find a reliable source, but thanks to Citizen Journalism it’s much easier for a consumer to find a reliable source that they can refer to for all their news, for example blogs are a large part of citizen Journalism as it allows anyone to set up their own platform and report whatever news they want whenever they want, it is very common for consumers to find a blogger they trust and that blogger may become their most reliable news outlet.

An example of Citizen Journalism is Wiki news; Wiki news is an online website with the tagline “The Free News Source You Can Write” This is a platform that any person with access to the internet can use to create news, any user can create or edit an article that does not break their guidelines, which includes no biased opinions, making Wiki news a highly reliable source as each article is reviewed to ensure everything you read is factual and unbiased. I am going to compare the same story in one of their articles to a tabloid article on how it presents its content. These are the articles I chose.

Wiki news:

https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/England:_Multi-storey_carpark_in_Liverpool_gutted_by_fire,_1,300_vehicles_destroyed

BBC News:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-42572999

The first thing to compare is the headlines, the BBC titled its article “Liverpool Waterfront car park fire: Site's security stepped up” This focuses on the community on the day, mentioning the security shows that the interest of this article is interested in the helpful acts of people, whereas the Wiki news article was titled “Multi-storey carpark in Liverpool gutted by fire, 1,300 vehicles destroyed” This is very formal and even states a fact in the headline, it’s very straight to the point and keeps the focus on the event rather than the community. The Wiki news article overall is much more factual, it gives us multiple statistics and figures such as what time the fire started, how hot the fire peaked at, and even how many fire fighters where needed to deal with the fire as well as what equipment they needed. The BBC article is completely different as the only statistic it gives throughout the entire article is the 1,300 destroyed vehicles, the rest of the article discusses what happened and the reactions of the people, it talks about how “Liverpool City Council said it had received numerous requests from emotional people who had sentimental belongings in the multi-storey car park.” As expected from a tabloid it focuses on appealing to the average viewers’ emotions rather than every detail of the event, it also brings up the security more than once with comments like “The authority said it was providing 24-hour security around the site and putting up hoardings for public safety and to protect the structure from strong winds.” Again talking about the people helping rather than the facts. Another thing to compare is the images used, since the wiki news article was created by an average user there is no images of the actual event just images of the location of the car park as well as a fire engine, whereas the BBC article was created by a professional journalist who has reached out to the council to get images. They also embedded a video of the fire that was recorded by a bystander.