The Relationship between Citizen and Mainstream Journalism for Covering Syria News

With the intercession of the new media, individuals were able to write news and publish videos through their participations on Social Networking Sites like Facebook, Twitter and blogs. This study is centered on citizen journalism which comes from the participation of citizens in making news. The main purpose of this study is to show the relationship between citizen journalism and mainstream journalism in covering Syrian news. The study interviewed 15 Syrians citizen journalists through the internet and he designed questionnaires to analyze the content of five Syrian events on Aljazeera news channel. The five Syrian events are Al-Bayda and Baniyas, the siege of Bab Amr, al Qusair and Khalidiya in Homs, Yarmouk camp, chemical on Al Gota. Result shows that the reason why Syrian citizen journalists are important is because of the covering of the demonstrations against the Al-Assad Regime. Other reasons are the fact that citizens had the opportunity to express their views on many subjects such as political, economic, ethics and freedom of speech which they’ve been prevented from for many years. Moreover, Aljazeera uses a significant number of footages and contents which came from Syrian citizen journalists. Due to shared political agendas between Aljazeera and citizen journalists, Aljazeera depends on them more than their own reporters while they are covering Syrian news. Majority of footages reflect Syrian opposition and the killing of Syrians which resulted from Al-Assad Regime. The study observed from interviews that Aljazeera depends on some persons as alternative source on covering Syrian news, and in a way they are iv becoming their reporters. This leads to a question about the future of citizen journalist (activists) in Syria. This study asserts that since this is the case in a dictatorship country like Syria, it suggests that studies like this should be done for democratic countries to see the importance of citizen journalism. Secondly, the study also suggests that for other studies, news content published by citizen journalists on their blogs and YouTube should be analyzed. Keywords: Citizen Journalist, Mainstream, Syrian events, Aljazeera channel