The Innovation in The Form of Crowd-Sourcing That Modern Communication Technologies and The Online Individual Brought to Journalism Practices

Abstract

The internet brought along a lot of innovations by entering our lives and bringing the social networks into use for the people. Newspapers and journalists are obliged to update themselves through change and transformation appropriate to these new environments. These innovations introduced the concept of networked journalism. The journalism that is trying to integrate itself into these areas found a field where it interacts with the reader/user. Users who benefit from the new communication technologies' opportunity are no longer only consuming the information but are also producing them at the same time. User generated contents shows us that these people who are connected to the networks play a more active role. At the same time with crowd-sourcing this activity has brought participation and cooperation in news production processes. The aim of this study is to present the characteristics of the terms networked journalism, user generated content and crowd-sourcing, which were introduced to us by the internet and social media, with a literature survey and is to discuss its effects on journalism via the example of The Guardian.