By Lovish Bhardwaj

Have you ever wondered how news channels get video footage, images, and information instantly when a natural disaster strikes or a major incident unfolds? Do they have journalists posted around the clock in every corner of the world? Obviously not. No news channel can have employees everywhere.

That is where citizen journalists come in. A citizen journalist is not an official reporter but works as an independent one, collecting, analyzing, and sharing information much like any professional journalist would. Citizen journalism lives on podcasts, blogs, images, and videos, usually on social media, and ordinary individuals can also serve as citizen journalists by calling out incorrect information circulating in society. Social media is the fastest way for such reports to spread, and platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have become the places where information first surfaces and gets checked. As journalist LZ Granderson put it, "With technology and social media and citizen journalism, every rock that used to go unturned is now being flipped, lit, and put on TV." The practice has its critics - the lack of background research and source verification can make citizen reports less reliable - but the criticism has not stopped its global influence.

The practice is known by many names. It is called public journalism when communities report for themselves, crowd-sourced journalism when reporters gather information from people present at the scene of an event, and bridge media because it connects professional journalism with society. Whatever the label, the idea is the same: ordinary people taking part in gathering and sharing the news.

Citizen journalism as an organized movement took shape after South Korean entrepreneur Oh Yeon-ho declared that "every citizen is a reporter." Dissatisfied with the traditional South Korean press, Oh and his colleagues started an online newspaper called OhmyNews in 2000, built on content generated by volunteers. It began with 727 contributors and grew into a network of tens of thousands of citizen reporters filing from around the world.

Citizen journalism today holds an important place in society, bringing unfiltered news to the surface within seconds. As technology and communication keep advancing, its influence will only grow, and so will the number of citizen journalists.