My Understanding of Citizen Journalism =]

In simple terms, citizen journalism is when a individual (private) does what a professional reporters do - report information. They are people that perform journalism without any journalistic training reporting the news to a wide audience. These information can be made and broadcasted in many forms such as a podcast editorial to a report about an inter-city meeting on a blog. These blogs may include text. pictures, audio and video. So basically its all about communicating information in a different way of some kind.

The other main feature of citizen journalism is that it can b found on the internet. With the emergence of the internet such as blogs, podcasts, streaming video and other web-related innovation has made citizen journalism possible for everyone. Before the internet people had to take form of independence in newspapers or newsletters, however technology has made it easy for basically anyone to create a blog or website, thus citizen journalism has become and important part of news reporting and getting the news to others.

Real journalist have proper journalism education are instructed to avoid plagiarism, knowing how to report a story properly and objectively and have an understand of journalistic ethics.

Whereas citizen journalist that don't have the proper training don't get the respect of those of journalist as they believe citizen journalism is not a legitimate field. However there are others that appreciate the new information that citizen journalism can provide.