Media Law & Literacy Blog

                   Remember when TikTok was called something else? Something different entirely? Before August 2018, the widely popular app known as TikTok used to be called Musical.ly. A simple phone app that allowed its users to create and post short videos of themselves dancing and lip-syncing to songs of their choice. Musical.ly was extremely popular, admittingly, when it was first released and featured. Now well-known creators like Lisa and Lena, Loren Gray, Baby Ariel, and many more were quick to follow and set every trend and dance.      Today, Musical.ly is no longer a brand name and instead has turned into the worldwide popular app called TikTok. TikTok is owned and run by an international company in China called ByteDance. The social media platform hasn't changed the initial reason for video creation. But it's changed all in the same. The short clips of Musical.ly now have a duration of 15 seconds up to a full minute with a wide variety of video genres from the origin

    For my EOTO project term and concept, I chose to research and present on Citizen Journalism. Citizen Journalism is basically recording and writing about news stories and events but done by untrained reporters, meaning everyday people hence the "citizen" in Citizen Journalism. The journalists don't work or get paid by large journalism or publishing companies like the New York Times or CBS. The overall idea of Citizen Journalism is to give every citizen a voice in the media and them a chance to participate in journalism, even without a college degree. It was deemed necessary because the mainstream media's credibility has become questionable at best in recent years.      Some of the positives to Citizen Journalism are that it presents the opportunity to cover all sides of the story, not just the bias side or one side of the story, and gives ordinary people a voice in the media. The events being reported on typically revolve around smaller but real challenges, such as