The relentless development of citizen power

Journalism has developed in many directions that seemed unimaginable just a decade ago. We were accustomed to the journalists´ image of serious, well prepared people with a different way of understanding the world, with their own ideals and principles, we were convinced that they had a sixth sense and that they were born to interpret and communicate. I won’t say time proved as wrong, but it is needless to say that nowadays mostly anyone can be considered a journalist. Far from considering this a negative aspect, I believe that it enhances communication, allowing us to tell a story from different points of view.

In this day and age there is a new type of journalism in which people participate and contributes in all news making, by sending information to newspapers through social networks or email, being connected has become necessary. All types of events are organised through social networks, campaigns, demonstrations, pacific acts etc.  Now anyone with Internet access has, so to speak, voice, you can critique, support, or simply provide data on what you find on the Web. Given the huge amount of information that is released to the network daily, journalists will have to be much faster, much more analytical.

The most controversial point of this new form of journalism, in which citizens participate actively in the process of generating information, is perhaps how to redirect the news to the more traditional media, and how to filter the information as not everything is reliable. There is currently an excess of data that can lead to confussion and errors. 

Furthermore, I will talk about the web participation of civil society. The first time we realized the power of citizen journalism probably was when an emergency landing took place the 15th of January 2009 in the river Hudson. An anonymous person took a photograph of the accident with its camera and sent it to the Huffington Post with the following caption “There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy”, these only 67 characters probably awakened the whole media atmosphere. Since then the journalism we had known would never be the same.

We also detected the extent of the power of social networks in Iran´s riots in 2009, even though journalists were forbidden to work and some even were expelled the Iranian people organised themselves through social networks and mobile phones, achieving not only to maintain the world informed, but also kept revolution alive.

The Huffington Post is an online newspaper that has revolutionized media communication; it was created both as a liberal alternative to other news aggregators and a commentary collector. It provides everyone who wants to the tools to express themselves.  
I will finish with a quotation of Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post and actual chief executive of AOL, that should motivate all us.


“Here, is the best part, anyone can become a citizen journalist all you need is passion, a little training and the desire to tell a good story. It’s time to get out there and report”