Thursday, March 29, 2007

Qotw9: STOMP is it citizen journalism?

Citizen journalism means to report news from your own standpoint. After September 11, many people wrote in their blogs, connecting the whole world on this tragedy. Photographs and little bits and pieces are posted on the web (Gimore, 2004) .



Is stomp.com ideal citizen journalism?

Definitely because people are sending in their mms and emails of recent happenings, like food news, people fighting, who fell down the mrt track. These news are highly personalised.
There is a section on asking questions and " talkback" which allows for audience's opinions. There is two way communication.

According to Bowman &Willis (2005) , citizen journalists filter, check for loopholes in argument, use photographs, audio and videoclips to record, doing " grassroots reporting", and so on. Stomp.com have all these features. People can sign up for a free account to volunteer opinions. I have tried to interact on the forums under the alias slovenlee.

Actually I applaud that Singapore has decided to embrace the new technologicsl method of reporting news, and the page is very colorful. This makes it attractive to readers.


Improvements:

The first disadvantage is that signup is tedious and hypersensitive to login. I had to try multiple times. There were a lot of errors that came out.

The Starblog section should have a better color scheme, green is almost too hard to read from. I think they should stick to a black background like the rest of the Stomp.
The games section under Stink should have more fun games. There are only word-games there. This is quite boring. There should be more shooting or space games for the young. Word games are for more for intelligent and older people. If stomp were to be more youth friendly, this area needs to be improved.

They should show recipes and steps on how to make nice food like what has been shown.
There is a lack in response on the bulletin boards. There are only 2 replies each time.



References:

Gillmor, D. (2004) We the Media. Retrieved March 29,2007 from
http://download.nowis.com/index.cfm?phile=WeTheMedia.html&tipe=text/html

Bowman and Willis (2005) Nieman Reports: The Future Is Here, But Do News Media Companies See It? Nieman Reports, 5 (4) Retrieved March 29,2007 fromhttp://www.hypergene.net/blog/comments.php?id=327_0_1_0_C

1 comment:

Kevin said...

It's good that you tried the service rather than to simply peruse it. Note that you made some spelling mistakes (e.g. technology). Please take care in writing accurately for the public.