Why Citizen Journalism turn to Citizen Paparazzi?

Source: AP 2008

Source: AP 2008

Citizen journalism is used to express a form of media that consent to the public to become journalist by reporting online (Tryemayne 2007, p. 240) while citizen paparazzi is not really a new concept, it is just taking picture using the cameraphones and videophones (Glaser 2005). The very famous incident that cause the citizen journalism to transform themselves intocitizen paparazzi was the London bombing. When the victims of the London bombing was in pain and suffering, digital cameras and videophone can be seen all over the place (Glaser 2005). Instead of helping the victims.The reason they take this pictures is to post it in their blogs, wikipedia and others. So that the picture will get good progress in their blog's credibility due to the fact that there is visual proof, according to Nielsen and Morkes (1997) the internet users mostly judge the web's credibility by looking at the quality of the web's content.In the book, the 'Text Shift: Examining the reading process print, visual, and multimodal texts', Walsh (2006) describe that "written part is only one part of the message, and no longer the dominant part" therefore they are determined to get the best pictures and why they are turning into the citizen paparazzi. If citizen journalist includes pictures in their document, it will make the reader's life easier according to Schriver, it is faster to search for a specific information by looking at the graphics instead of the prose.

Reference List:Glaser, M 2005, 'Did London bombings turn citizen journalists into citizen paparazzi?', Online Journalism Review, viewed 12 June 2008, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050712glaser/

Tremayne, M 2007, Blogging, Citizenship, and the Future of Media, Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group, New York

Morkes, J and Nielsen, J (1998), Applying Writing Guidelines to Web Pages, viewed on 10 June 2008http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/rewriting.html Schriver, KA 1997, 'The interplay of words and pictures', Dynamics in Document Design: Creating text for readers, Wiley Computer Pub, New York, ch. 6 pp. 361-441

Walsh, M 2006, The 'textual shift': Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts', Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 24-37