Pop, rock, r&b, reggae, jazz, country –these are genres of music. Journalism, just like music, has its own genres –traditional, civic, interactive, participatory, and citizen journalism.
Traditional Journalism is like classical music, the dominant genre of journalism for several decades. It is a category of journalism in which newsmen serve as scouts who screen events, prefer relevant events with the use of their news judgment, and delineate them for their audience.
It is basically bound by the confines of traditional training in official news institutions, and frames of reference in which newsmen determine what compromises news. This model constrains active audience participation, except for Letters to theEditor and merely reactive, insignificant to the content of news, does not influence process of news gathering audience response.
Civic journalism, on the other hand, transpired as a result of observed insufficiency of traditional journalism. It is also known as public journalism which is a concept of empowering audience participation, obliterating the elitist notion of newsmen. In 1993, Rosen and Meritt formed the concept of public journalism in the US. Albeit permits active participation of audience in the process of news-gathering, newsmen in mainstream media structures are still in control of news-gathering.
The digital age has revolutionized the process of collecting information. Newspapers, once the only means to access current events, have seen declines in circulation as the internet use seemed to prosper. This paved way for the emergence of interactive journalism.
Interactive journalism is a variation of journalism that approves and allows consumers to directly participate and contribute to a news story. Through web 2.0 technology, reporters can have a conversation with the audience. Frequently used tools for it are blogs, like Facebook, Tumblr, BlogSpot, and WordPress.
In this format, bloggers share their expertise, experiences, and eyewitness stories, in which they cite and link it to some mainstream news articles. This format enables readers to supply further information or corrections.
Participatory journalism, is highly similar with interactive journalism in which their only difference is the degree of participation. Participatory journalism has greater participative ratio than interactive, it actually engages news consumers in the news gathering process.
Participatory journalism goes a step further than interactive journalism by actually engaging consumers of news in the newsgathering process, similar to collaborative journalism. There are some similarities of interactive and participatory journalism –they both use the internet as their ultimate medium. Some features of this variety include discussion boards, user-generated content, and blogs.
Citizen journalism, is a form of journalism where in the audience performs journalistic activities and eliminates the authority of professional journalists. It can be initiated and sustained by only one person, but can also be practiced by a group of people, an activist organization, news websites, etc. Generally, news-based blogs are considered mobilizing citizen journalism.
These genres of journalism are merely forms of journalism that people all over the world have practiced through time that has brought advantages and disadvantages. Nevertheless, these are some forms of journalism a newsman could observe.
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