Citizen reporting: the democratisation of media?

The tsunami of December 2004 and the bombings in London well and truly brought citizen reporting to the fore. We all watched the camera mobile footage and pictures of the London bombings. And the mad scramble for 'tourist video' footage around such events is a norm nowadays.

The trucker's wife who captured the crash of the concorde on video must have experienced this. Even in the recent bomb blasts in Delhi, we saw News Channels offering rewards for footage shot at the site.

While an election is not as intense an event as some of the tragedies above, there is a lot going on that main stream media would be unable to capture. Or should that read 'chooses not to report'. And this is where 'citizen reporters' could play a role.

And they are alreay doing so, with the help of rediff.coms 'Be a Citizen Election Reporter!'. A simple web interface helps anybody with access to a computer and an opinion put in their thougts and from the slew of posts even in the first few days of launch, people seem to love this opportunity.

The best thing about this idea is that people are not held up by the so-called ethics of journalism. This is just a space for airing of views and opinions. A few extracts below to illustrate that;

Says Muthu Mani, a citizen reporter from Chennai
TN ministers are never seen
The AIADMK government is not at all bothered to meet the people's problems. Almost in every part of the state the roads are bad. The ministers and MLAs are never seen in their constituencies. Instead of blaming the central government, the state could have done something useful for the people. but they didn't.

While SS Venkata Subramanian begs to differ

On the other hand the the present government in tamilnadu have satsfactorily carried out its work though hiccups were there viz.strikes, frequent transfer of officials etc., For any government to sustain the common man needs food,shelter and water along with few pennies.