People Power

Everyday morning since I was a child, my grandfather read the newspaper from cover-to-cover. Every night, he and my grandmother watched the nightly news report on television. They trusted these outlets to provide them with accurate information about current events. For so many years, this was our only news model: news outlets would report to the public, and the public would listen. Within the past decade this has changed drastically. "People power" has brought us many tools that have transformed news reporting from a one-way conversation to a multidimensional, participatory one.

Due to the growth of the internet, news avenues have changed tremendously in the past 10 years. In 2000, we were pretty much limited to what the traditional news outlets and early bloggers (with limited credibility) put out. Now, in 2010, we turn to well known citizen-journalists, expert bloggers, Wikipedia, and alternative news sources like Huffington Post for our news. This did not just happen overnight, however. All of these sources, both individuals and organizations, had to earn credibility by consistently providing accurate, timely information to readers.

More often then not, today's breaking news comes from everyday people, not news outlets like CNN or FOX. In fact, in many cases, Twitter has been cited for informing those news outlets before they even got word of the story. In cases like the 2009 Iranian presidential elections, Michael Jackson death story, and Hudson River plane crash, people really started to acknowledge what a powerful and effective news-sharing tool Twitter has become.

In addition to reporting news, Web 2.0 has also brought us sites like Digg, which allows people to decide what news is important to them, and then share it with their social networks. The main difference between now and the way we used to get our news is that today news consumers have the ability to participate in multidimensional conversation about what they feel is most important. We now have the choice to decide whether we want our news "told" to us by traditional news corporations, or to be an active participants in the news, engaging in the conversation through our comments, tweets, Facebook posts, or votes/likes.

While traditional news outlets will always have their place, I believe that user-generated content is quickly taking over and gaining a reputation as a reliable and extremely timely way to access news. User-generated content may never replace CNN or the New York Times, but if nothing else, it is an excellent supplement to those outlets, and provides something that the traditional news sources don't - an invitation to participate in the news.