The Digital Vibes

Citizen journalism has been around for a long time, but the Internet together with mobile phone technologies, have definitely aided its growth.  It’s so easy be a citizen reporter today, capturing videos and photos with one’s mobile phone and uploading them onto blogs, forums and websites with your personal commentary.

OhmyNews, a South Korean online newspaper with the motto “Every Citizen is a Reporter”, is the world pioneer in open source news with most of its articles written by citizen contributors.

A Vancouver-based website with a similar vision, is garnering strong attention and traffic, and not to mention venture funding. NowPublic prefers to call itself “crowd-powered” and has ambitious plans to change the way news is made and distributed. With more than 100,000 “very active” contributors in more than 6,000 cities and 160 countries, NowPublic has also recently acquired Guy Kawasaki’s brainchild Truemors, a site that aims to spread “true rumors”.

With the crowd realizing its power and making every effort to be heard, the news ecosystem is forced to change to accommodate the readers and viewers who want to participate in newsmaking today. The question for PR practitioners, is how to keep up with the changes, and maintain our ethics and professionalism in the process.