A Bird-Eat-Bird World
I could not help but post this little gem from the BBC's website.I won't post a link out of respect for the pidgeon, but I can assure you there is a video on YouTube if you'd like.
I'll let the content speak for itself, but I would like to point out that this story basically exists thanks to Cathal McNaughton. There was no BBC photographer on the scene to get a shot, the picture was taken and sent to the BBC by somebody completely unaffiliated with journalism.
I won't call it citizen journalism, because I still feel it's just a fancier form of newsgathering. But it is a perfect example of what Paul Brennan talked to us about a couple weeks ago.
posted by tromano @ 10:26 AM
2 Comments:
This is a great article, but actually I disagree with you. I would call this woman sending in her photo "citizen journalism" because she is not a journalist and her work is being used to illustrate the story. It's directly related to the BBC's user-generated content that Paul talked about when he came to class. I think that it's examples like this that show citizen journalism and user-generated content will soon become commonplace.
I guess I still see the woman as a source. She's giving information to the BBC that will be used in an article, which is what a source does.
If she called up the BBC and said "a seagull just swallowed a pidgeon whole in a park," the BBC would use the quote in article and attribute it, but that wouldn't make her a journalist.
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