EOTO Two Review

Before seeing these presentations, I had thought I understood what post of these topics were and they could be applied to real life situations. After watching and learning from my fellow classmates I realized that I did not know that much about some of the topics. Specifically, the ones that I learned the most from were from the second group- or the Mediasphere. The two topics that I will be addressing are Citizen Journalism and Alternative Media.

Citizen Journalism

One of the biggest things that I learned from this presentation was that citizen journalism helps community engagement and consists of pamphlets, radio, blogs, and social media. By definitions, citizen journalism is journalism that is conducted by people who are not professional journalists but use tools to spread information. Some of the other notable things that I learned from Olivia's presentation are the fact that this form of journalism continues to grow and the evolution of this form.

One of the reasons that this type of journalism is continuously growing is due to the fact that social media is growing both in users and in the services they provide. As for the evolution, before phones and social media, citizen journalism was primarily used via pamphlets and radios. After this, the next form was usually online blogs and forums. Throughout the past 20 years, social media has been one of the biggest forms of citizen journalism.

Alternative Media

The biggest thing that I learned from McConnico's presentation is that while this form of media is a step up from citizen journalism, it is still a step below mainstream media. I also learned that this normally consists of nonprofits, they are normally independently owned, and they are normally more specialized. 

By definition, alternative media are sources whose content differs from mainstream media and mass media in terms of content and distribution. Alternative media normally does not make any profit or have any sponsors, so they are not discouraged from writing about difficult topics or topics that would typically not be covered by mainstream media.