Citizen journalism

Citizen journalism is also something to consider when thinking about PR trends. Dan Gillmor thought it important enough to quit his day job to set up a site devoted to it http://citmedia.org/blog/.

Citizen journalism is essentially viewer accounts and pictures of events that can be considered news. They are becoming increasingly more common as technology advances and everybody has a mobile phone with decent megapixels.

In the aftermath of the July terrorist attacks in London in 2005 these pictures and witness accounts were vital for the BBC, Sky etc to be able to provide up to the minute information for the millions of TV viewers and web users watching the events unfold. And more recently there have been advertisements in the newspapers - in particular the red tops - offering to pay readers for their pictures and news stories.

While there are ethical questions to be answered, with mobile group Three entering into a partnership with ITN and Sky earlier this year to feed in viewer news clips, it seems that citizen journalism is on the increase.

So what does this mean for PR? Well it's not good news. With newspapers able to go directly to readers for news stories it means there is less opportunity for PR people to get their news into the papers. PR practitioners will need to work harder and look at ways in playing these citizen journalists at their own game http://prblog.typepad.com/strategic_public_relation/2006/02/10_flickr_hacks.html.