The role of conventional publishing
To analyze the role played by traditional journalism, the ethics of crisis reporting and the responsibility of reporting crisis should be firstly considered. Sue Tait (2011: 1221) sees bearing witness as ‘a rationale for journalistic presence’. When journalists encountered the atrocity, their responsibility is not to intervene, but to express their inability to the crisis and inform the audience of the suffering, thus it facilitates the response and reaction from the audience (Tait, 2011: 1227). This is a constitutive factor in bearing witness, which Tait (2011: ) calls ‘response-ability’. ‘To bear witness is to take responsibility for truth’ (Felman, 2000: 103-4, cited in Tait, 2011: 1226), but it does …show more content…
Following the principles of truth-seeking and truth-telling is essential for journalists to fulfill their responsibility, but to tell the truth journalists need to ensure the accuracy of the very detailed information, such as the total number of casualty and the type of chemicals contained at the warehouse. Moreover, this event is continually unfolding and information is updated very quickly, but it takes time and effort for journalists to verify and follow up. The explosions happened at midnight and most of professional journalists lack the proximity to where the event took place. It pauses another challenge for the conventional journalists to achieve immediacy. Wahl-Jorgensen and Pantti (2013: 196) acknowledge that the coverage of disaster should go beyond bare facts, ‘give voice to the victims’, and humanize the suffering to ‘resonate with audiences’. However, this responsibility of bearing witness is rarely reflected in local news channels, which was playing Korean soap operas as the crisis unfolded (O’Flynn and Reuters, 2015). The party’s official media such as the People’s Daily refused to cover-up over the causes of the massive explosions, but called for the public to trust the central government to investigation into the blasts (Li and Huang, 2015). It aroused public anger as the official media are deliberately block the reaction and inquiry from the public, while it could argued that the citizen journalism in …show more content…
The innovation of user-generated content is its ability to meet the requirement of the newsworthy values in conventional journalism such as immediacy and live witnessing (Waisbord, 2013: 208). Thus the citizen imagery and live reporting are widely employed by mainstream journalists as a new tool of gathering information and connecting with the audience (Patching and Hirst, 2014: 200). For example, many videos filmed by witnesses are embedded in the online news report (BBC, 2015a), and the comments from the Weibo users are frequently quoted (See Ryan, 2015). Additionally, citizen journalism also gives voice to the voiceless, such as the victims and the firefighters in the case of Tianjin. The citizen journalism is appealing as it not only expedites the information gathering, but also tells the untold stories (Sienkiewicz, 2014: 693). For instance, a wide circulated image in Weibo is a screen-shot of a text message exchange between an unnamed firefighter and his friend before he was sent to tackle the flames. Here is the last message form him: ‘If I don’t come back, my father is your father. Remember to visit my mother’s grave.’ His friend replied: ‘Your dad is my dad. Take care.’ However, citizen journalism is unregulated by the journalistic values, so the most notable risk for citizen journalism is the
To analyze the role played by traditional journalism, the ethics of crisis reporting and the responsibility of reporting crisis should be firstly considered. Sue Tait (2011: 1221) sees bearing witness as ‘a rationale for journalistic presence’. When journalists encountered the atrocity, their responsibility is not to intervene, but to express their inability to the crisis and inform the audience of the suffering, thus it facilitates the response and reaction from the audience (Tait, 2011: 1227). This is a constitutive factor in bearing witness, which Tait (2011: ) calls ‘response-ability’. ‘To bear witness is to take responsibility for truth’ (Felman, 2000: 103-4, cited in Tait, 2011: 1226), but it does …show more content…
Following the principles of truth-seeking and truth-telling is essential for journalists to fulfill their responsibility, but to tell the truth journalists need to ensure the accuracy of the very detailed information, such as the total number of casualty and the type of chemicals contained at the warehouse. Moreover, this event is continually unfolding and information is updated very quickly, but it takes time and effort for journalists to verify and follow up. The explosions happened at midnight and most of professional journalists lack the proximity to where the event took place. It pauses another challenge for the conventional journalists to achieve immediacy. Wahl-Jorgensen and Pantti (2013: 196) acknowledge that the coverage of disaster should go beyond bare facts, ‘give voice to the victims’, and humanize the suffering to ‘resonate with audiences’. However, this responsibility of bearing witness is rarely reflected in local news channels, which was playing Korean soap operas as the crisis unfolded (O’Flynn and Reuters, 2015). The party’s official media such as the People’s Daily refused to cover-up over the causes of the massive explosions, but called for the public to trust the central government to investigation into the blasts (Li and Huang, 2015). It aroused public anger as the official media are deliberately block the reaction and inquiry from the public, while it could argued that the citizen journalism in …show more content…
The innovation of user-generated content is its ability to meet the requirement of the newsworthy values in conventional journalism such as immediacy and live witnessing (Waisbord, 2013: 208). Thus the citizen imagery and live reporting are widely employed by mainstream journalists as a new tool of gathering information and connecting with the audience (Patching and Hirst, 2014: 200). For example, many videos filmed by witnesses are embedded in the online news report (BBC, 2015a), and the comments from the Weibo users are frequently quoted (See Ryan, 2015). Additionally, citizen journalism also gives voice to the voiceless, such as the victims and the firefighters in the case of Tianjin. The citizen journalism is appealing as it not only expedites the information gathering, but also tells the untold stories (Sienkiewicz, 2014: 693). For instance, a wide circulated image in Weibo is a screen-shot of a text message exchange between an unnamed firefighter and his friend before he was sent to tackle the flames. Here is the last message form him: ‘If I don’t come back, my father is your father. Remember to visit my mother’s grave.’ His friend replied: ‘Your dad is my dad. Take care.’ However, citizen journalism is unregulated by the journalistic values, so the most notable risk for citizen journalism is the