| dc.description.abstract | This study focused on the impact of citizen journalism on gate keeping process using the
Kenya Broadcasting Corporation Television as a case study. The Information Super
Highway has created a new order of information overload where the citizen as a nonprofession
is making contributions to media content. Traditionally, a journalist is the
professionally trained person with the skills to decipher the information the audience
should receive. However this trend is changing in the wake of online journalism. This
research project may lay a foundation on the extent communication revolution has
weathered any measures or controls on gate keeping process. The research was therefore
founded on the gate keeping theory as a mass communication theory that describes the
process by which news and information is gathered and filtered to audiences. This study
was also informed by the normative theory concerned with examining how media ought
to operate given the watchdog role in society. The research employed a descriptive
survey, purposive and stratified sampling techniques to collect data on the elements of
citizen journalism practices and how these are appropriated in news and i nformation
programmes. Data was analyzed with the help of Statistical Package for Social Scientists
(SPSS) version 17 technique for descriptive statistics. From the findings most of the
respondents were aware of citizen journalism. Short Messages Services (SMS) were the
main aspects of citizen journalism contained in Good Morning, followed by opinion polls
while twitter was the least element observed. The main challenges facing citizen
journalism were reported to include inaccurate and difficult to verify reports, poor quality
pictures and most reports lacked objectivity. Most of the respondents supported
introduction of guidelines that adhere to the editorial policy in citizen journalism. | en |
