The term "citizen journalism" sounds like an elaborate concept, involving groups of citizens who sign up for some sort of advanced program and then go forth and report on news events -- with a "Digital Press" card in their fedora perhaps. In reality, however, it's average people with cellphone cameras and digital videocams, taking footage of events that occur around them. A great example is the video clip of Robert Dziekanski being Tasered by the RCMP at the Vancouver airport, which you can see for yourself on globeandmail.com, or at dozens of other websites and on television.
Paul Pritchard happened to be in the airport waiting for a flight, and was watching as Mr. Dziekanski became more and more agitated at being separated from his mother, who apparently was unaware that he had arrived and was still being kept behind the security doors (it was his first plane flight and he didn't speak English). His video is disturbing not so much for the images of Mr. Dziekanski writhing in pain -- although those parts of the video are difficult to watch -- but for the almost complete lack of attempts to calm the victim before he is Tasered not once but twice.
In fact, the first nine-tenths of the video is just Mr. Dziekanski walking around behind the security barrier, obviously distressed but not actually violent. At one point a woman goes up and tries to speak with him, and then leaves. Security officers mill around, but not much else happens until the police get there. The Tasering seems even more violent because of the complete lack of activity leading up to it -- something that a simple clip from the video as run on the evening news would likely not make as obvious.
This is one of the main benefits of a "citizen journalist" video such as Mr. Pritchard's: there is no editing. And despite the attempts by the RCMP to keep the video to themselves -- Mr. Pritchard went to court to force them to return the video to him, as they had promised to do when he provided it -- it is now available for anyone to see and make up their own minds about what happened. Sites such as NowPublic.com (based in Vancouver) provide an easy way for people to make their videos and photos of news events available almost as soon as they occur, and projects such as journalism professor Jay Rosen's OffTheBus (a joint effort with Huffington Post) are an attempt to apply that model to political reporting.
Broadly speaking, the phenomenon of "citizen journalism" isn't that new -- after all, the Rodney King video incident took place almost 15 years ago, and the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination was arguably one of the first examples -- but it is becoming more and more common, and that will likely continue to reshape the way we look at media, and the way media looks at us.