Today's about Citizen journalism, and in Singapore case, I'm talking about Stomp.sg. Stomp.sg is a interactive news portal by The Straits Times for citizen journalism. Basically, all the news updates are generated by members of the public and not by professional press. Thus, the public is greatly involved in the news development and updates.
As the Stomp.sg is a news portal maintained by the public for its news content, I decided to use coverage as the criteria to evaluate it.
I would say that the coverage of Stomp.sg is terrible. Most of the news generated are trivial matters of the public brought up by irritated "Stompers". For example are misbehaviour of the public, poor service rendered by a certain company, complaints of certain situation such as malfunctioning lamppost etc. Rarely news of greater importance is surfaced on Stomp.sg, such as MPs visits and interaction with the residents to improve on their experience residing in Singapore. Thus, the coverage of the portal is very limited by what the individual thinks is important rather than what the public thinks is important. This somehow reflects the mentality of Singaporean of being self-centered.
I feel that sharing information in Wiki is a excellent example of community spirit of give and take. Different users can collaborate and consolidate information together under a single webpage, and users can help to detect and correct mistakes by others. Thus, this will dramatically increase the quality of source. However, Wiki is very reliant on community spirit in order to maintain its credibility. A biased person can edit the information to suit to his agenda and corrupt the text with misleading information. As the information is available on the web on a global scale, there is a risk that unsuspecting users will hold the false information as true. Therefore, using and editing Wikis must be done in great care.
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