Citizen journalism: a primer on its evolution

Abstract

Citizen journalism is a concept in media that has enabled people to participate in journalistic activities. Citizens who are not journalists by profession actively contribute to the process of news gathering. It is the advent of information and communication technologies that is believed to have made citizen journalism more accessible to people across the globe. With increasing prevalence of cellular phones, digital cameras, computer and Internet, many ordinary people nowadays are covering news and circulating it globally within no time. Citizen journalism is generally seen as a new trend in journalism. It is said to have emerged with the technological innovations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But as a matter of fact, citizen journalism has a history older than professional journalism. It is just that internet and new media technologies have accelerated the pace of citizen journalism, otherwise it was always there. The paper traces the history of citizen journalism globally and aims to find out as to how and from where did it emerge?