Thursday, January 5, 2006

Over at Editor's Weblog, published by the World Editors Forum, Bertrand Pecquerie ponders citizen journalism again, and comes up with a succinct taxonomy of citizen journalists:

1. "The citizen journalist who owns a digital camera or a camera phone and sends shootings to a news organization during a major event (tsunami, London bombing …) or a local car accident."
2. "The citizen journalist who wants to cover its local or virtual community and produce targeted content.
3. "The citizen journalist who is a militant and campaigns for political reasons. How Eason Jordan was fired from CNN by infuriated bloggers in January 2005, was a good example of biased citizen journalism.
4. "The citizen journalist who is eager to participate to a conversation with professional journalists and bloggers. News is just the beginning, says Jeff Jarvis and, in some cases, it is true."

That's a good start. And obviously, there's cross-over among those categories. Citizen-journalist No. 1 also may be a No. 4, and so on. Most people, should they choose to be citizen journalists at some point(s) in their lives, probably will move around and sample some or all of them.

We might add to Pecquerie's list the "citizen editor" -- the news consumer who partakes of news and news-aggregation services that allow consumers to vote on stories' importance and thus influence how stories are played. But maybe that's a component of No. 4.
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