News for Citizens by Citizens

We are bombarded with news stories; therefore, we have to ask ourselves what is news? The book Media Literacy by W. James Potter describes news as having three constraints: deadlines, resources limitations, and geographical focus. With these constraints in mind, citizen journalism sites can overcome most of the limitations. I have examined the American Town Network citizen journalism site and found a section of articles about events and daily activities of places across the nation.

Steven Outing notes in his article “The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism” that there are several different types of citizen journalism sites. Ones I have found important to the theme of responding to the constraints of news are: opening the site up to public comment, having the citizen as the add-on reporter, and having an edited stand-alone citizen journalism site. By incorporating one or more elements in a citizen journalism site the reporting of news will not be as constrained.

With traditional print media it is often hard for journalists to gather information about an ongoing event or story. Using an online site could eliminate the constraints of a deadline because new posts and comments can be added to the story as the event continues. The three layers of Citizen Journalism mentioned in Outing’s article show how news can overcome the constraint of deadlines by having local citizens post articles and comments about the events.

The constraint of resource limitations can be improved by Citizen Journalism because the people involved in or experts on a story can post their views. With an endless number of people contributing the need for resources should not be a problem.

The constraint of geographic focus closely ties to the American Town Network site. By browsing this site I found stories about specific places. When looking at my hometown’s site I found it was broken into smaller townships. This was interesting because many newspapers are going out of business or merging with other newspapers and leaving a gap in community news coverage. With Citizen Journalism, people in smaller communities can get news about their community and also post news.