Citizen journalism

After reading the article written by Steve Outing, I feel that citizen journalism isn't too bad of an idea, and reading these 11 layers of Journalism really helped to change the way I think about citizen journalism. I never really had a problem with citizen journalism. I feel that as long as the information is truthful then there is nothing wrong with it. The one problem with this is citizen journalists don't have to be truthful. In this regard to this you need to be careful with what is actually truthful. Also, with the fact that you can comment on almost any article now many people can put their own opinion in about news. This is a great way for knowledge to be shared between authors and readers. The fact that knowledge can be shared this way definitely takes away editorial control. With no control though people could post anything they want. There needs to be a balance between the two. I feel that a good balance can be found in the hybrid models. An example of a hybrid newspaper is annarbor.com. This newspaper is predominantly online, but it also produces a printed publishing. This hybrid model has the editorial control so that facts are published, and it has the citizen expression because people can comment on it. Also, if annarbor.com doesn't like the comments they can remove them. Tony Dearing, the chief content officer for annarbor.com, came in to talk to our journalism class, and he said how the position of editor is not used as much anymore. Most journalists now know how to edit their own writing so they don't need editors, but they are still there to make sure the sources are accurate.