Comparative Analysis
The modern society has witnessed the rapid development of new technologies that altered the nature of human communication and information exchange. The impact of these new inventions has stretched from everyday interactions between friends and members of the family to such global issues as political journalism. This paper will compare two articles devoted to the relationship between user-generated content and journalism. It will explore how these papers treat the concept of citizen journalism and study the similarities and differences in approaches employed by the authors. Both articles are written by Jönsson and Örnebring (2011) and Wall and El Zahed (2014) study the principle of user-generated content and the way this content can compete or co-exist with traditional forms of journalism. However, the perspectives of the authors are not the same ones; and they come to different conclusions.
The articles have several similarities. Both researches agree that the role of new technologies, such as the Internet, mobile communications, and etc. significantly influence the development and intensification of user-generated content. Wall and El Zahed (2014) argue that Facebook and small YouTube channels were the only media that had been used to communicate the important and uncensored information about the events happening during the Syrian Revolution. They also highlight that these technologies were so important that the state decided to ban them (for example, the Facebook ban in 2011) as the powerful sources of information that could damage the government’s image. Discussing the degree of user participation in the process of creating content Jönsson and Örnebring (2011) also highlight the following fact. Such technological innovations as blogs, wikis, online polls, etc. are directly aimed to collect feedback from users about different concepts or events happening in different spheres of life. These new forms of Internet communication significantly have changed citizen journalism and all other forms of user-generated content publishing. Therefore, Jönsson and Örnebring (2011) and Wall and El Zahed (2014) have come to a similar conclusion. The internet should be regarded as a driving force of user-generated content intensification.
Both articles highlight the role of new markets that emerge as a result of the dissemination of new web technologies. The authors agree that the notion of user-generated content should be analyzed within the frames of the market demand that accelerates the development of this sphere. They believe that the users that see that such content is appreciated and needed tend to pay more attention to the creation of corresponding posts or articles. At the beginning of their article, Jönsson and Örnebring (2011) even give an example of The USA Today that has opened a new website. It offers all the facilities for users to post their comments or share the news. The aim of this and other similar innovations is to create a community around news by providing the readers the ability to comment on every story and recommend content they find valuable. These factors form a sphere of the political economy of user-generated content. Therefore, both articles agree that the process of the market creating and strengthening is two-dimensional. It means that information agencies and newspapers, such as USA Today, react to the demand of readers to read more user-generated content. Readers, in their turn, are able to produce more content of this type as it becomes much easier with the corresponding techniques and facilities.
