Citizen Journalism is a really simple term that has pulled a great crowd to itself over the years. The term is used to describe the involvement of media users in the information creation and dissemination process. This simply implies that other members of the citizen, aside trained journalists, contribute actively in spreading information.

Well, this is made possible by the inventions of technological advancement majorly the social media. People use twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Instablog, Snap chat and lots more to spread real time information to news audiences, friends etc until it gets to journalists, in some cases. Having served the country and ofcourse globally contributed to quick information gathering and dissemination, citizen journalism has also back bitten particularly on the social responsibility duty of the Nigerian mass media. Issues and prospects of citizen journalism for Nigeria constitute the major part of this article.

Lack of training
Journalists in the mass media industry are trained practitioners who are equipped with the ethics of the profession. On the contrary, citizen journalist are constituted with people who do not really care about the implication of the nature of information they disseminate to the public, they are only enthusiastic about sharing information. The implication of this is that the image of the mass media or journalist so to say are lost including the development media goal of the Nigeria Media which is to report issues that are in line with positive development goals.

Lack of Censorship
Obviously, citizen journalism makes use of the social media as a primary media tool. Social media in our world lacks censorship. In a communist societies such a Japan, the government have control of the media their citizens are exposed to. Our challenge here in Nigeria is that this is a free market economy and a seaming democratic state so to say, bringing in the social media censorship into the system amounts to compromising the freedom for which we campaign for.

So what does the future hold for citizen journalism in Nigeria?
From all indications, it seems as though citizen journalism will continue to wax strong as the day goes by. It will only face challenges which may include censorship. The abuse of the social media tools has remained paramount in the history of citizen journalism. However, the benefit of citizen journalism cannot be overemphasized as it has to aides the spread of information in real time.

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