Collaborative journalism: the Twitter @plantao190 and police journalism in Curitiba

This article aims to show how the Internet and the popularization of production tools potentialize the ability of ordinary, amateur people, to produce news, a fact previously reserved to professional journalists in lieu of service communication vehicles. Thus, ownership of technology and the eliminationof geographical barriers, provided by the Internet, helped spread the content of these amateurs, removing the, until then, absolute exclusivity of the journalist to spread facts and disclose information. For this, we carried out a bibliographic review to try and understand how this empowerment process of the amateur started and what are its effects on the practice of journalism. As a theoretical reference, it is possible to highlight authors such as: Dam Gilmor (2005), reference in engaging the topic of evolution of the practice of journalism and collaborative journalism; Francis Pisani & Dominique Piotet (2010), that have dedicated their studies to show the transformation of the web and its impacts on communication, and, finally, author Clay Shirky, who analyses the amateur productions published on the Internet and their relation with its users. As an empirical approach to exemplify the presented theory, a Twitter profile, microblogging tool on which is it possible to post texts with up to 140 characters via mobile devices with an internet connection, was selected. The profile @plantao190 is curated by photographer Jo o Carlos Frigério, who is not a journalist (despite his title), but still informs in real time the police occurrences in the city of Curitiba, becoming a reference in the area and being read by thousands of users who, besides consuming his content, interact and even send their reports which later become new posts.