Okay so last month we talked about how the internet is changing radio, and the month before how internet is changing television, but did anyone ever think the internet would change how and when we hear breaking news. TV. Radio. Old news. Today it’s all about getting news online—and not always from the big media companies first. The power now resides with the people, in citizen journalism.

According to a recent report titled We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information, citizen journalism involves regular people “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing and disseminating news and information.”

Citizen journalism is perhaps once of the most remarkable features of the information revolution the internet has brought so far. Breaking news is no longer coming from massive media outlets, rather from average person.

Like other media, citizen journalism comes in various forms. Online Journalism Review classifies citizen journalism into the following forms:

• Audience participation
• Independent news websites
• Full-fledged participatory news sites
• Collaborative and contributory media sites
• “Thin media” such as email newsletters
• Podcasts and other personal broadcast sites

But audience participation is probably the biggest and most influential form of citizen journalism. It encompasses user comments attached to new stories, personal blogs, photos or videos captured from personal devices or even local news written by members of local communities.

Blogs are particularly relevant here as they are often written by people with no affiliation to big media or other commercial organisations and they traditionally have included reader comments at the end of most postings. This is percisely the citizen journalism experience.

Here’s a real-world example. Earlier this month news broke on AOL releasing search logs which involved about 650,000 AOL users (see Big Brother earlier in the newsletter). What is interesting here is that the blogging world caught wind of the release much before any other traditional media outlets.

Originally posted on Digg.com, the story came to the attention of many in the online community on TechMeme, an online blog news scraper service. When Mike Arrington of TechCrunch blogged about the story, things were picked up by Techmeme, word really got out quickly. After around 18 hours traditional news media organisations such as Reuters picked up the story and started running the AOL blunder in their regular news cycles.

This is a massive change to the way traditional news media works, faciliated by connected, committed journalists working from home, publishing blogs, and using 'editorial-less' sites like Techmeme and the Australian Gnoos.

So you may be left wondering then, how did the information get posted originally on Digg? Well, digg is a user-driven social content site, which means that everything on the site is submitted by the digg user community — and anyone is free to become a member of this community.

When someone submits content to the site other digg users can read the content and vote for how much they “digg” the content. The more “diggs” a posting gets, the better it will rank on the site. Pretty neat really. And what’s most interesting is that this site gets more traffic than even the New York Times website!

But blogging is not the only way to be a citizen journalist. The rise of personal technology devices is too having an impact on what we see in the media — particularly online.

While traditional news media has been accepting user help in reporting stories for years, people with digital cameras and camera phones are sharing glimpses into their own worlds more then ever before with the help of the internet.

Remember the London bombings last year? The first images anyone actually saw were from people's camera phones. Before journalists could even get to the scene images of exploded subway cars made it online.

Big media is catching on.

American Cable News Network, or CNN as most of us know it, has a new program that allows users to send in audio and video from breaking news events in their region. Users can email or upload content directly to CNN’s website.

Reader-generated photos, video and audio fill the gaps where reporters couldn’t get to fast enough or safely. Perhaps one of the first cases we saw of this was the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 when a student trapped and hiding in the school actually called CNN on their mobile (rather than the authorities) to give a play-by-play as the situation unfolded.

Whether we see such tactics as exploitation, or as giving the power back to the people, there is one thing for sure going on here. News is being broken on online mediums though the help of everyday people in extraordinary circumstances.