Exploring the Attitude of Tanzanian Journalists to Citizen Journalism

Abstract

Citizen journalism has emerged as an empowerment tool to ordinary citizens who are now capable of gathering and disseminating information on Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms sometimes in direct competition to professionally trained journalists and in other instances complementing their efforts. With this premise in mind, this qualitative study explored the attitude of Tanzanian professional journalists to citizen journalism through in-depth interviews with managing editors, news editors and reporters who were purposely chosen from three media houses: the government-owned media Daily News and Habari Leo, the privately-owned media The Guardian and Nipashe and cross-border ownership—The Citizen and Mwananchi. The number of study respondents was 24. The findings revealed that citizen journalism is flourishing in Tanzania. Traditional media, mostly the privately-owned outfits, are incorporating citizen journalism outputs into news routines. In specific terms, citizen journalists provided tips or news ideas which are then developed by professional journalists into fully-fledged news stories while taking into consideration news values and ethics, made available news worthy information from localities not covered by media professionals and impacted newspapers’ content much more than radio and television. Based on the increasingly important roles played by citizen journalists across the world, it is recommended that their outputs be embraced by Tanzanian media, including government-owned entities that seem to have no interests in citizen journalism, if citizens are to be kept abreast of daily intelligence.