Recruiting citizens to do the paparazzi dirty work

When two of the biggest movies stars in all of Bollywood (Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan) are planning to get married in a secret wedding how does Rediff news plan to cover the event?

By sending out a call for citizen journalists to mail the photographs, video to them.

Now, YOU can become a Citizen Journalist, and have your reports published right here on rediff.com
Here's how: If you spot Aishwarya Rai, Abhishek Bachchan, their families, guests, or if you are lucky enough to witness the wedding, take a photograph or a video, scan the pictures, and mail the pictures and video clips to us.

More and more Media organizations are actually recruiting citizen journalists to cover everything from world events to celebrity news.

They even played an important role in the coverage of The Virginia Tech Massacre.


Why hire professional journalists to break stories when you can find citizen journalists to sent you scoops for free or little money?

This is part of the exciting new world of citizen journalism. As long as their is still someone acting as an editor and someone doing a little fact checking with enough scepticism to tell when a story is too good to be true. In order to be a trusted news organization you have to have filters to distinguish the Hoaxes from the real thing.

This can help major media organization to get the immediate rare footage that their viewers crave and it give the average citizens to decided which angle to cover the story. But we must stick to the Principal of accuracy over immediacy. Reporting rumors just to say you heard it here first will always come back to bite you when the truth comes out.