Why Citizen Journalism?

OhMyNews says, “every citizen is a reporter”. This site, established in 2000, runs by the content generated
from South Koreans and citizens of other nations and only 20 percent of the content comes from its employed staff. Citizen journalism has become really popular in the 21st century and with social media and social network citizen journalism is rocking. And in Nepal it’s progressing.

Nepal’s context

The beauty of communication lies in the right to expression and right to information. The world has never been
connected like this ever before. It has become a global village. Bloggers and citizen journalists are pouring more information in the web. We know most of the breaking news either through twitter or facebook these days. And sometimes, we get the information directly from the spot, just like the case during operation Geronimo.

During the earthquake few months back in Nepal information flowed from twitter and facebook, people were sharing what they felt and shared their pictures and videos.

With the increasing number of televisions, online, broadsheets and radio stations citizen’s journalism is gaining significant space in Nepal. From United We blog and Mysansar.com to meroreport.net, the need and effectiveness of online media has increased a lot.

Citizen journalists from Nepal have been reporting on different websites from CNN I report to Ohmynews and various other citizen journalism
platforms.

Debate over the payment for content

This is the debate that is going on around the world whether media should pay the content produced by the citizen journalists. I think that they should be paid. With that citizen journalism would be more credible. If there is a tendency among media house to pay for what the citizens report on than that will enable people to come up with even more diverse and serious issues. This will moreover change the scenario of journalism by making every citizen a reporter.