Citizen journalism in politics, Part 1

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There is a big shift going on in the field of political coverage. The US election is the most obvious and also most interesting example.

In the past voters were relying solely on traditional media sources in combination with friends and family for information about candidates and the latest political news (and gossip). Now we are seeing the dawn of an era where citizen journalism will really influence the outcome of elections. Maybe not citizen journalism in the way we thought it would look a few years ago, but rather in the sense of a real time short form news flow a la Twitter or Jaiku.

It remains to see if the outcome of the US election will be as affected as it looks right now or if the Twitter crowd is still to small in actual voter numbers. But it still shows the way of the future were crowds are filtering the news and keeping us updated in real time. Twitter is just one example but it shows that the tools for citizen journalism need to be very fast and easy to use for them to really gain traction in larger consumer groups.

The FASTForward Blog writes about how Twitter is becoming the primary first news source for web savvy people like the blog author himself - Rob Paterson. According to Paterson Twitter is at least one day ahead of traditional media oulets in coverage of important news and has become his most important source for political news.

If you want to dive into this world I would recomend that you head over to election.twitter.com for a real time flow of US election related “tweets”.

We will continue this article series right here and in our subscription based trend report “Urban Lifestyle Report - New Media”.

//Tomas Nihlén, Editor in Chief

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