NEWS WRITING BASED ON CITIZEN JOURNALISM: STUDENT PERSPECTIVES AND CHALLENGES

Abstract

students' interest in writing must be increased, especially writing based on citizen journalism. Therefore, this study would like to find students' perspectives and perceived challenges in writing based on citizen journalism. This research was based on a case study. The research involved 68 students from one of the Universityy of PGRI Semarang, and it analyzed 20 selected news writing papers written by students. The instruments for data collection included questionnaire and observation. The results of this study found that 59% of students perceived that writing news writing papers is very difficult. The students found it difficult to find suitable citizen journalism for writing material and develop their ideas. They tended to use articles as the citizen journalism from the internet whose originality is unclear. One reason this happens was because 80% of students did not know where to find or get indexed journals to use as references for their writing. In addition, many students also preferred not to use journals that were majorly English-based because of their limitation of English skills. The implication is that students should be given further understanding of how to access journals and use reference citizen journalism in writing. It is expected that every lecturer will give more source-based news writing assignments so that the ability of students to write and develop ideas based on existing citizen journalism can be further improved.