By Sarthak Bangwal

Citizen journalism is commonly defined as ordinary citizens "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information" - journalism conducted by people who are not professional journalists but who share information through websites, blogs, and social media. In conventional journalism, reporters go through rigorous training, earn mass communication degrees, and build portfolios and experience over years. With citizen journalism, a person can skip all of that and start reporting incidents from their own surroundings as "facts".

The most important difference between professional journalism and citizen journalism is that professional journalists know they cannot let their emotions run their reports. They have to report facts no matter what. Citizen journalism follows no such principle. Citizen journalists often report what they feel about a matter. The context of a case is taken for granted or ignored entirely, consciously or unconsciously, and something that only seems to be true gets reported as fact - and the biased report is absorbed by ordinary readers who take it as fact too. This can create misunderstandings that grow into major social clashes.

Citizen journalism can also be biased towards the survival of the individual and their community. It may take the other side's motives for granted and perceive them as hostile, when those others are often doing exactly what the citizen journalist is doing - promoting their own group's perspective.

And yet, unprofessional as it can be, citizen journalism is a necessary part of society. It shows the perspective and point of view of particular groups to the wider public. That matters, because people can then understand the other group's position, however self-interested it seems, and negotiate with it in mind. Citizen journalism is also free from corporate control, where a like-minded few decide what to report and what to hide. No one is immune to corruption, but when someone is passionate about bringing people true news, corruption loses its power. Blogs, news portals, and social media pages all count as citizen journalism unless they are owned by a news company.

Truth is as important to people as food and shelter, and honest, well-meaning citizen journalists have the power to provide it to the masses.