Ordinary people as journalists

Citizen reporting can push governments, contribute to improve local environments and provide important news stories One example of a place where citizen reporting has made a difference is Lewisham. "Graffiti and fly-tipping was a real problem in Lewisham and we knew we needed to take a radical approach to beat it,” said Steve Bullock, the mayor. The south-east London council opened a website that allowed residents to send pictures of graffiti and other enviro-crimes taken with their mobile phones, the Guardian reports.

“Our innovation paid off. In the first year more than 15,000 enviro-crimes were dealt with, with twice as much graffiti being cleared up as in previous years. In most cases, graffiti and fly-tips are now being cleaned up the same day as they are reported, three times quicker than before", Bullock said.

Jo Twist, a journalist from the BBC reports about a different type of citizen reporting; mobile phone reporting.

Many of the recent big news stories, for example the latest bombings of London, have had footage taken by amateurs with their mobile phone cameras.

“Mobile phones provided some of the more immediate and vivid images of the bomb attacks in London”, Twist wrote. The fact that regular people’s mobile phone pictures can become front page images, results in a smaller divide between regular people and professional journalists.

Moport.org/ takes citizen reporting a step further and offers their members “a free service for sharing and viewing mobile phone reports”. The site allows people to report in real-time and the website writes that “[…] we built MOPORT.org to take advantage of consumer electronics and easy distribution methods so that anyone with a camera phone (or a digital camera and email) can be a reporter”. The appearance of photos from the abuse of Iraqi soldiers by Americans is one of the examples the website uses to promote their photo circulation.

“These images, along with reports by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker and other media accounts, pushed the US government to publicly address an issue it had largely suppressed. The official response was less than forthcoming, and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld even tried to shift blame to the mere existence of the cameras and photographs rather than administration policy”, the website states.