Citizen Journalism

It is such a powerful thing to be heard, to have someone turn to you in response to your call- that’s what citizen journalism has done for us. It is not just in Nigeria but the world at large. Everyone’s voice gets heard these days- all you need to have is ‘V and D’ as I call them- a view and a device and pronto you’re a Citizen Journalist. Your views can even make it into mainstream media if it well articulated and gets seen by the right person, (authenticated where applicable) and well edited.

That’s what tonnes of Nigerians were over this weekend. They became photojournalists, political analysts, strategists and editors. They were editing and re-forwarding various messages which arrived at their destinations in the third version on your device. The passion was not to be mistaken lightly. Erm…, I dare say the passion was way above when the Nigerian team was playing a match. People just kept the floodgates of information open; from when accreditation began at their various wards to voting mishaps, photos of performing or erring supervisors, everything was online.

People waited to count votes and then disseminated the results with their views; people collated numbers across the nation with their phones, published on Facebook, Twitter, and everywhere.

Oh, I forget to mention the videos too. There were videos of committed Nigerians voting under the rain, some people voted till 4am. The videos were very heartwarming, some alarming with at the amount of vituperations captured.

It was interesting to see that some of the numbers eventually published by the mainstream media tallied with the ones earlier circulated by CJs.

In all, I think it’s an exciting phase we’re in, one where every citizen can get heard, but most importantly one that provides a wide area of coverage of people and areas traditional media can’t always reach.

Some advantages of citizen journalists are that members of public are able to alert the media to news stories that they may not know about, or that professional journalists have not got the physical ability to cover. Citizen journalists can be a massive help by providing information in real time. Not that the CJ reports aren’t often one sided, emotive or sometimes out rightly misleading

For example many stories regarding the Arab Spring and the ‘occupy saga’ were covered by citizen journalists when mainstream media were unable to reach areas of conflict or a media blackout was in place. Smaller newspapers often need to rely on citizen journalists for the latest updates, due to their low staff count.

Through my own experience of posting on social networks I see citizen journalists as complementing mainstream media by providing speedier reports and information from a range of sources that allow mainstream media reports to be better balanced and factually more accurate.

This past year, citizen journalism has brought us much good. For instance, the justice for the Ejigbo pepper saga, a cry out about the Aluu4, the Chibok girls, abused women and children stories ( which the Lagos state government agencies responded to), errr…, and not forgetting supporting governance to ensure all votes counted. Here’s cheering the Citizen Journalists of this past weekend. Good job!

Nkiru Olumide-Ojo