...According to a recent Los Angeles Times article, YouTube has ushered in a new era of journalism through what it has named the "YouTube Effect." Similar to its precursor the "CNN Effect," in which people marveled at the existence of a 24-hour news source, video-hosting web sites open up the journalism field even further by enabling people to act as "citizen journalists," or amateur journalists who record and disseminate news of events to the public. While CNN created a constant outlet for news, YouTube and other sites like it act as a global dissemination hub for news by ordinary people.
Despite the name, the YouTube effect is not limited to YouTube, though it is one of the most well-known sites. Many other citizen journalist sites exist, such as
Newsvine and
NewsCloud. Even CNN now maintains a small citizen journalist site known as "I-Reporter" (most notably applied during the recent shootings at Virginia Tech). However, one of the original and most influential citizen journalist sites is
OhMyNews.
Introduced in South Korea in 2000, OhMyNews is a site composed almost entirely of writing done by citizen journalists. The site has grown to international proportions and now receives contributions from all over the world....
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