Part of all this reminds me of the dawn of the Internet and the downloading of music. Artists were up in arms when it was all brought to light and lawsuits ensued. Then after the Napster issue settled down, the artists were amazed to find out that their music was still being downloaded for free by millions of users. So what’s the moral of the story here? People will find a way around anything that is forced as pay to use content.

There will always be a way to find the information or files you want no matter how many roadblocks are put up. Perhaps the most stunning realization is that these corporations and CEO’s don’t understand that no exclusive content can remain exclusive when it is online. And to remove your sites from something as widely used as Google is complete suicide for a website. I personally Google everything, even sites for which I already know the URL. So when the day comes for my daily news fix, I will not even have the option to navigate to these pay sites. Where will I go? To the other hundred quality websites that offer great content for free.

Men like Rupert Murdoch can’t sleep at night knowing that people are getting things for free. I find it hard to sleep at night knowing there are people out there that think they can control the Internet and its content.

However, with all this power comes great responsibility.  It is all too easy to get sidetracked and waste time on these sites and this has become apparent to employers.  Recently The Washington Post has begun to monitor the social networking of their journalists more closely, realizing that although it is a great tool for resources, it is a great tool for time-wasting.

So the question remains, where do employers and journalists draw the line?  It seems the honor system may be the best way to go about it.  But there will always be a difference between professional uses of these sites compared to personal uses of these sites.  It is when the two begin to meld that they cause problems.  Personal pictures and statements made can reflect on the professional life of a reporter and the organization they work for. Anything posted online is assumed to be open to the public even if you have your privacy settings turned on.  Opinions shared online can hurt the credibility of the Journalist and his career.  Would you trust a journalists report on a politician, after hearing on his facebook or twitter that he thinks the person is an idiot?  Probably not.

The negative far exceeds the positive when it comes to this issue; journalists have to be seen as non biased fact collectors who present the information to the public to allow them to make their own decision. Today’s social networking world is thinning that line, journalists and people are feeling an urge to post every thought they have and every action they make for the world to see.  Personal is no longer personal, today it is all public.

Now Public is one of the premier citizen journalism sites out there right now, they have citizen journalists working all over and the content on the site is very interesting.  The site itself looks almost like a professional news site, but closer inspection on the stories show’s a lack of format and journalist touch.

Ohmynews is an international citizen journalism site that offers a great deal of content and many professional written stories.  It seems that there are real journalists writing on Ohmynews.  Interesting to see when you consider that many journalists view citizen journalism as pushing the journalistic field into amateurism. The layout of the site is easy to navigate and it has a large variety of different kinds of stories on it.

CCNireport is CNN’s attempt to get into the citizen journalism game; they have stories written by citizen journalists. It seems like this CNN site is more of a tool the news organization is using to bring them more video and content.  It seems that even large organizations like CNN are aware of the shift in power, and that breaking news will more than likely be captured by a passing person on a cell phone than a news team.  This is a genius way for them to get that breaking footage before anyone else, and I see it as a way of them adapting to this new age of News 2.0.

Web 2.0 has created a user generated media that is uploaded by the very people who only consumed it in the past. Long gone are the days where people would crowd around their television sets waiting to hear the nightly news.  Today people have only to open a laptop to find the information they seek, with some participating in the social driven media via blogs or social networking sites. The age of the professionally trained journalist is starting to seem lost in opinionated information sites that pose as traditional news.

It seems that the majority of users haven’t noticed, with many blog sites getting more hits than any long respected news organization sites. Crumbling away are the tried and tested rules of accuracy and neutral reporting.  The internet has given everyone a voice, and it’s up to the user to pinpoint the voices that can be trusted.  Traditional news sites are losing their monopoly on photographs and video, in a world where a click on the side of your phone can capture news as it happens.

It is true that everyone seems to be journalists these days. However, there will always be a place in this new 2.0 media for the trained journalist who is looked to for honest, factual reporting.