Citizen Journalism - Challenges for Albanian Media

Citizen journalism, participatory journalism or user generated content journalism are the terms we use about a phenomenon that emerged through the years with the evolution of internet and technology and it came through different forms such as social media, bloggers, wikis. It implies the involvement of citizens in news collection, production, sharing, analyzing, discussing and commenting by using different platforms. The definition commonly accepted is that citizen journalism refers to news produced by amateurs, random people willing to share different information for different situations. Whether some sees these terms used to describe this phenomenon ambiguous others do not prefer to call it journalism and describe these people more as seasonal or circumstantial news gathers. However, this type of journalism is changing the mainstream media, the conception of news production and consumption even though opinions in about the impact it has on mainstream media are contradict. Observations has shown that revenues and audience for printed newspapers and advertisements have declined through the years forcing many newspapers to close their activity and making very difficult for others to survive. Answering these questions is extremely difficult but what we can say is that citizen journalism and professional journalism do differ in somehow and professionals like to draw a line between two types of journalism. Citizen journalism has both its negative and positive aspects and different scholars and professionals have different opinions regarding it.