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Podcast - Clickbait

Antigua Travel

#Helpful

Print is dead. We’ve been hearing this for years, but the newspaper industry is putting up a good fight. Not many are surprised by the fact that the print newspaper industry is in structural decline. Similar to the 6’oclock evening news, why wait until the end of your day to receive your news? We can use the internet to access news 24 hours a day, this way you get your daily dose of news whenever and wherever you like.

Besides the obvious convenience of digital journalism, we can also receive more information than ever before. Whenever you read an article or news piece online, there are dozens of relating links on the page, just a click away.           

#Hashtags are nothing new. But this year, I’ve stopped hash-tagging #LikeForLike and learned how I can use hashtags to further my career as a journalist.

Hashtags help journalists find people posting about topics they are reporting on. This is especially helpful during the interview process. Whenever you attach a hashtag to a tweet, Facebook post or even Instagram photo, it is immediately indexed by the social network and searchable by other users. People with shared interests will use regular hashtags to help others find related tweets.

For example, my hometown has been hit with 2 winter snow storms in the past 48 hours. If I was looking to talk to people affected by these storms, I would go on twitter and look up the hashtag #NLWeather.

Hashtags have the potential to be extremely valuable, when used the right way. Over hash-tagging can distract users from the main message of the post, and can also make the post look like spam.

Remember - Less is more!

THE IMPORTANCE OF CITIZEN JOURNALISM

The purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with honest information which they will use to make the best decisions about their lives, society, and their governments. If citizens are also able to help provide this kind of information, why not let them get involved?

The first person on the scene of a breaking newsworthy event in most cases, is an ordinary citizen. Citizen journalism has grown immensely over the past decade, mostly because of technological developments.

The September 11^th 2001 attacks were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda on the United States. Many believe this is where the rise of citizen journalism began, and the digital age. Before 9/11 social media didn’t exist, shooting and uploading a video was left up to the professionals. Not every person was walking around with a cell phone in their pocket, but a select few people did have access to camera phones and disposable cameras on that day.

These days many news organizations have platforms available to the public where they can upload their content. One of these platforms is CNN's iReport, which is a citizen journalism initiative that allows people from around the globe to contribute pictures and video of breaking news stories.

With an iPhone in every hand for nearly a decade now, anybody can be a journalist. But now publication is more instant than ever. Just last summer Diamond Reynolds livestreamed the aftermath of her boyfriend being shot by a police officer on Facebook.

This is a case of citizen journalism that made us view Reynolds situation from a perspective that we would have never seen through mainstream media. 

With blogging, Youtube and social media, citizen journalism is more popular than ever. But since most of these individuals are not getting paid, they have less of a commitment than mainstream media.