RonanOKelly's Blog

This post is in relation to a posting by Ruth Hogan about the website indymedia.com. Her post can be found here.

Indymedia does have distinct advantages in it’s ability to sift through the various regions allowing for a more native approach to the news. Citizen journalism and independent news is a rare thing in Ireland, one which is yet to truly (more…)

The following post is in response to a blog entry by David Kearns about the decline of the American newspaper., which can be found here

As is evident from the Google map in David’s post, the newspaper has been having a difficult time as of late. The last fiscal year was the worst ever recorded for the U.S. newspaper industry shown in figures published by the Newspaper Association of America. Although these figures show a decline in revenue for both print and online journalism, the (more…)

One of the most prominent ongoing stories in the news this year is the death of a G20 protester in London. The man’s death was initally thought to be due to a heart attack, however internal bleeding was later proved to be the actual cause after a video taken by a citizen journalist was released on The Guardian newspaper’s website. The video showed police vioilently pushing Ian (more…)

Wikinews is a free content news source wiki from the Wikimedia corpotartion (the brains behind Wikipedia).  The idea is much the same as Wikipedia in that users can write and edit their own news stories to create a collaborativly written news site. Users, under the watchful eye of site moderators, can write and edit news stories and interviews or rewrite articles from other news organisations. The site’s neutral point of view policy is what distinguishes it from other citizen news sites. (more…)

Over the last few months there has been a new social networking force gaining a serious foothold in the mainstream social media. The unfortunately named Twitter is a 140 word micro-blog used to create personal updates about the user. (more…)

The mainstream media has a set of rules and guidelines that set out how a journalist should go about thier profession and the standards and ethichs that they should adhere to. While thousands of journalists all over the world agree to uphold this code of ethics, they do not necessarily apply to citizen journalism and blogging, so it seems only logical to draw up a new set of guidelines to govern the ethical standards of bloggers. (more…)

I was extremely surprised to read an article in the Online Journalism Review which said that more and more people were begginning to see citizen journalism as their most trusted news source. While one would imagine that since there are no editors or fast-chekers in this kind of media that their reliability might fall short of that of a trusted and established news source. (more…)

I found an article published by Tom Grubisich which can be found here. The article reviewed ten different citizen journalism sites ans judged them by their quality and content. The study found that these new citizen journalism sites fell short of the standards expected for news sites. This survey was taken in 2005. (more…)

I’m sure I am very far behind the times, but I have only recently discovered an extremely powerful and poignant blog called “Where is Raed?‘. This blog gives an amazing and extremely humanistic perspective on how everyday life in Baghdad was affected during the U.S. invasion and occupancy of the city. The blogger, Salam Pax, (whose last post on this blog was in 2004 because of (more…)