You already know what we covered this week. I don't need to restate it. Let's get down to business.
I'd like to open with an example of a successful prosumer who exceeds communitychannel. His name is Philip DeFranco, and is one of the leading idols for amateur news on YouTube.
Phil, channel name "sxephil", gains subscribers and views by taking the modern news and throwing his extremely blunt yet true opinions at them. A motto of his reads "I don't make the news. I just make the news bearable". He is the 13th most subscribed person on YouTube, averaging 1.5 million views per video, which he releases every day except weekends. He doesn't like to talk about the money he makes, but three years ago he was doing the show using a $50 webcam and a single Mac. Now he has bought his own headquarters and hires around ten people to edit, produce and expand his work.
If you watch his 12th September video, he explicitly states he doesn't even get many sponsors due to his blatant style. He says that the only reason he got to where he is now is because of us, the audience. Through audience empowerment, we now have a new source of media, one stripped of corporate gates and decisions.
One of the readings this week capitalises on this new type of audience empowerment. Through the explosion of the kind-of-recent microblogging platform Twitter, news is now created pretty much instantaneously as it happens. As seen in the article: "Instead of being built by some kind of artificially intelligent software algorithm, a customized newspaper will be compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network."
Both of the above cases are prime examples of citizen journalism. It is becoming clear that we are beginning to break the bonds of corporate media, upon the realisation that we ourselves can create media with more truth, or punctuality or entertainment.
Let me know what you think. Thanks for reading :).
