Enhancing citizen journalism with professional journalism education

Abstract

Conceiving the citizen journalist as a counterpart or even an antidote to the traditional journalist may have been alluring at one time, but these two public communicators have more in common than not in today’s media environment and clearly benefit from each other’s existence. This article will begin by briefly describing what separates the citizen journalist from the traditional journalist – at least in popular perception. In reality, these descriptions are at best generalizations and the characteristics used to describe one or the other type of journalist are likely to overlap at times.