Citizen Journalism for Community Empowerment: A Preliminary Idea

Abstract

The development of technology and the internet has strengthened the potential of citizen journalism. It allows citizen journalism to gain public attention by becoming an alternative source of information. The “issue” is then because this information is shared by common people, there will be a risk that the information is incomplete or does not meet the journalism standard. This paper attempts to make an analysis about the practice of the Community Information Group or Kelompok Informasi Masyarakat (KIM), an unit formed by the Indonesian government which is in Sleman, Special Region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The tasks of KIM include managing and utilizing information and communication to overcome information gaps and absorb and/or channel people’s aspirations, and it consists of the common people which have no skills about journalism. Therefore, the writers then by this paper want to share experiences while giving them a series of journalism workshops or training. Based on the writers’ experience in providing training for groups of citizen journalists, the most critical things that need to be addressed in citizen journalists’ news writing are the information completeness and the writing structures (title, lead, and news structure). In addition, photography is also another aspect to be addressed. It because of some technical issue which did not know by the KIM members, such as: composition, framing, heading room proposition, focus between images and subject, and the news value many photo works taken by citizen journalist are far from ideals and contain similar news value or theme of events, namely documentation photos of events or activities.