Citizen Journalism

If you type Citizen Journalisim into Google you get about 17 million results and all which describe the concept in different ways.

If you take a look at Tom Merrit's Blog for CNET.com.au it goes into detail explaining the difference of inside journalism vs outside perspective.
In his blog he suggets that todays blog is yesterdays newspaper. He also makes mention and what i deem to be very true that Websites started off the same way as blogs- Tom suggets that websites in the 1990's was a very academic or possibly a personal thing to have, by the end of the 90's it was a business venture and so the "blogs can simply be seen as a very special kind of Web site".

The concept of journalism vs outside perspective which Tom talks about in his blog describes the idea that journalists of blogs are citizens. He then goes on to describe citizen journalism as "regualr Joes with Web site, as opposed to folks who are employed by big media companies...Outsiders eventually can become insiders, and less often, insiders fall to become outsiders again"

On the other hand i found another blog which discusses Citizen Journalism however in a more negaitve way.
The blog named: Citizen journalism sucks is written by James Farmer for The Age. He seems to think that being a journalist all you need to do is write, report and publish and you are no longer a citizen but better known as a journalist. According to James Farmer "Journalism is a profession and journalism provides for the quality and breadth of content that keeps an enormous number of readers coming back for more. "

After reading both of these articles i am confused as to what i really think about citizen journalism. I do believe however that journalism is a profession and a hard one at that. To me blogging is not journalisim it is an expression of ideas and words, and i am not sure if i am sourced enough to decide on whether i think Citizen Journalism is a good or bad thing. However i do know that having a story in reagrds to a "real person" and a "real life story" is pretty interesting and if that is what citizen journalism is- well maybe i am for it.

But you should have a look at both of the articles and decide for yourselves....