Different between Traditional journalism and citizen journalism

Traditional journalism is gathering of information, writing and reporting news and which has a process of editing and presenting via newspaper or other types of media. In traditional media news has to be accurate, quality and style.

While for citizen journalism is the involvement of citizens playing the role of gathering information, writing and reporting news through internet or other form of new media. The main different of citizen journalism is these news publication are written using the voices and recommendations of citizen unlike traditional journalism which is written by and edited by professional journalists.

The raise in new media has made citizen journalism emerged popularity over the years; an example of citizen journalism in Singapore is Stomp. Many raising issues have been bought up from citizen journalism.

Reliability of articles on stomp

Issues on reliability of the articles on stomp has been bought up, from an article on http://youth.sg on 15 march 2007, It was said that since anyone could write and post information online how reliable are these? And unless readers can distinguish the reliability of the news, else the reliability of the information is doubtful.

I have read up some news on stomp, I find that some of the reliability of information can be doubtful as there was not any supporting evidence to support it.

An example(Click here) that I had read up on stomp is that a stomper claimed to see a group of students vandalizing at a stone table under Block 954, Hougang Avenue 9. The stomper did show pictures of the table being vandalized but how much can we trust this? Maybe these stone tables might have been vandalized long ago? I feel that news like this might not be as reliable as it is and it’s up to one to trust the reliability.

Irrelevant articles written on stomp

Another issue is articles written on stomp being irrelevant. There have been articles which I find useless or irrelevant posted on stomp. An example(click here). I find this article being irrelevant as the stomper is telling readers that it is going to rain? Which I think readers can see for themselves. This is not the only irrelevant articles on stomp but why are they not being removed? As a reader, when I read such articles I felt irritated by it as it makes readers feel that they are wasting their time reading such article. And these useless articles are increasing; maybe Stomp should remove these irrelevant articles.

Invasion of privacy articles written on stomp

The last issue is whether journalism on stomp which invaded people’s privacy should be removed. There are a lot of articles in stomp which are invading people’s privacy, pictures of couple kissing, couple hugging and many more but at least some of these pictures have the faces being censored. But I still feel that this is not appropriate as these pictures are being taken without them knowing and being posted on the website.
An example (click here)
And how would you feel if you find your pictures are being posted on stomp? Would you have a feeling of being insecure when you are kissing with your girlfriend next time round? Yes we cannot stompers from taking pictures and posting them on stomp but stomp can removed these privacy invading articles on the web.