Like so many other industries, the growth of the internet has changed the landscape of journalism.
Traditionally, the ability to author media was an exclusive responsibility held primarily by the elite.
The idea that anybody could author a blog that millions of people read was unheard of.
This changed tremendously with the advent of the world wide web in the early 1990s. The world wide web allowed anybody with a computer to have the ability to report to and reach out to a large scale audience.
A new phenomenon of "citizen journalists"; members of the public trying their hand at the journalistic process[1], broke out in massive numbers. Ordinary people were now blogging, recording videos, or even recording pod-casts of their versions of the news to mass audiences.
For the first time, a person who didn't trust the corporate media to relay reliable information was able to find alternative media outlets.
Now, citizen journalists have become many people's main source of news.
For example, Philip Defranco, a youtuber who reports the news, has over 1.7 million subscribers[3]. In comparison, The New York Times had only 100,000 online subscribers as of april 2011[2].
In a pre-internet age, Phlip Defranco would have been a nobody in the world of journalism. However, as many companies are learning; as technology changes, so do industrial mediums. More and more citizen journalists are removing the asterisk and becoming "just journalists".
[1]http://citizenjournalism.missouri.edu/researchpapers/bentley_cj_carnegie.pdf
[2]http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ce4902ec-6c19-11e0-b36e-00144feab49a.html
[3]http://www.youtube.com/sxephil
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