Hello, in the previous video you looked at how members of the public can
become citizen journalists.
In this video we'll look at ethics in the digital age.
We'll think about the rights and
responsibilities of citizen journalists and talk about the advantages and
disadvantages of having more voices in the media.
You may remember back in unit one,
we look at the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution.
This say's that journalists are free to report the truth
without the government trying to control what they write.
This amendment also protects citizen journalists in the US when they
write the truth.
They just have to make sure that they are writing the truth.
Citizen journalists also have responsibilities.
They should think about some of the same principles of journalism
as professional journalists when they write.
When they write an article or post on a blog, they should think about originality,
not copying someone else's work, and fairness.
They should also be concerned about impacting people.
They should consider humanity, respect for others and
empowerment, giving power to those who do not have it.
Having more voices in the media means the democratization of journalism.
Democratization means ordinary people have more power.
In journalism, it means that more people have an opportunity to tell
the world what they think.
This is certainly true in the digital age.
People can use blogs and social media to share their ideas with the world
much more easily than before the internet existed.
However, this has both advantages and
disadvantages, meaning both good things and bad things.
The main advantage is we can see more events happen in more places.
Because of technology like smartphones anyone can record what they see and
broadcast it to the world.
This means that when people see powerful people causing problems.
At a rally or a demonstration for
example, they are in a good position to record and share it.
A lot of the video and images that professional journalist used
are filmed by citizen journalists, who are at the scene.
Citizen journalists can help professional journalists in this way.
Another advantage is that citizen journalists do not have to worry
about how many readers or viewers they get.
World professional news organizations have to think about the size of their audience,
how many clicks each article or video gets.
A citizen journalist can cover any story, even those that might be very popular.
In this way stories that normally do not get any attention will be told.
The disadvantage of democratization of the news media
is that nobody's checking what is written.
Citizen journalists have to check themselves.
And this is not always successful.
Their articles can be badly written, much too long, or simply not true sometimes.
A good example happened in 2008 when a citizen journalist
reported that Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple suffered a heart attack.
Apple stock fell 10% in 10 minutes, until people realized that the report was false.
A report from a professional journalist would've been edited and
checked before it was published, avoiding this problem.
So, in this video we looked at ethics in the digital age.
We talked about the rights and responsibilities of citizen journalists.
And about the advantages and disadvantages of having a democratized media.
Next, you'll read a text about journalism ethics.