Citizen Journalism in Indonesia

            Citizen journalism (also known as "public", "participatory", "democratic") "guerrilla" or "street" journalism is based upon public citizens "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information (wikipedia). In this internet era, where the worldwide network reaches both the cities and the villages, citizen journalism give people chance to do almost all of the professional journalistic activities and publicize their work independently. Indonesia, with more than 250 million populations, has
one of the most large internet users in the world. With the large amount of internet users, citizen journalism is growing rapidly and has major effect.

            Social media, personal blog, and video sharing site are the most popular medium to do citizen journalism. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter are very popular ways to share a report because people can share photo, video, text easily and make chain reaction. Personal blog is like a free website. Blogger.com is the most popular site that provides free blog. With blog, people can share information in a complex way and reach more viewers. Most people nowadays have cameras, professional camera, pocket camera or at least their phone’s camera. Use a video sharing site like Youtube, is a more professional way to do citizen journalism. In Youtube, people can make their personal channel and have subscribers from around the world.

            Citizen journalism has many advantages. For the reporters, it gives them chance to learn and develop journalistic skill. For the viewers, it gives them chance to receive many kinds of information that rarely published by Mainstream media. Besides, citizen journalism in Indonesia also brings negative effect because many people use citizen journalism to spread fake report and propaganda for their personal need.

(This was written in my writing class, enjoy, feedback please)