On the 28th Jan, Creative Cuppa successfully held its 3rd meet-up in Group Study Room 2.2 of the David Wilson Library. Many thanks to Walid, Jennifer, Tony, Taslim, Patama, Danaya, and Ivy for their enthusiastic participation and supportive feedback. This time our discussion was focused on the topic of online journalism and citizen journalism. After a 10-minutes video show, the discussion started with a debate on “copyright issues”. Critically, it is good news to see an increasing trend of ordinary people becoming interested in posting news stories and other information online, though this causes increasing concerns about copyright violation. For example, as Walid pointed out, some people might “steal” others’ ideas and got them published on their own blogs; and this could be suspected as violating copyrights. However, as Jenifer argued, because there was no economic payback for doing so, this shouldn’t be considered as a big problem. Tony partly agreed with Jennifer, and he thought that online journalism allowed people to express different opinions on social events and receive diversified information from alternative channels other than mainstream media; and he thought this was more important than anything else. However, he also stressed that, people should indeed consider the reliability of the information they had received from these channels, because some news stories might be nothing but fictitious.
Apart from the “copyright issues”, there was another important point brought into discussion, which was whether citizen journalism was facing legal problems when it dealt with certain sensitive information, because laws vary from country to country, but the Internet was tended to be “boundless”. Therefore, on the one hand, citizen journalists should be allowed to say anything of their interests; but on the other hand, they should be highly responsible for everything they say, and make sure that their words don’t break the local laws. Thus most participants agreed that it was necessary to develop the national laws to monitor online journalistic information, in order to make sure that the process of online journalism would become increasingly legalized. Walid also added that, although it might be useful to improve international laws to regulate online information, there were supposed to be huge challenges due to the clear existence of diversified national situations, both culturally and politically. Finally, most participants agreed that, even though the web providers should not take responsibility for illegal activities of online journalists, they may still need "self-regulation" on the information posted on their websites.
Video link: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=58iZpMRclwI (Citizen Journalism - What Is It?)
Next time, we will be focusing on the theme of "Network Identity". Thanks for all your contributions. Looking foward to seeing you all next time!
Best wishes,
Jin Shang
2/2/2009
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Creative Cuppa:
http://creativecuppa.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=60675201456
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