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Citizen Journalism *

James F. Hamilton
University of Georgia
Introduction
General Overviews
Journals
Formative literatures
Social movement media
Cyberactivism
Public journalism
Normative arguments
Critical assessments
Media Convergence
Perspectives
Radical-democratic perspective
Media-management perspective
Hybridized perspective
Blogging
Motivations
Blogs and news production
Blogs and political journalism
Other technologies
Social media and spot news
Smart phones and images
Industry structure
Work routines
Ethics
Politics and participation

Introduction
Perhaps the most important organizational development in journalism since its professionalization
more than 100 years ago is the emergence of citizen journalism. Although non-professionals
have engaged in journalism for as long as it has been regarded as a profession, today citizen
journalism as a form of non-professional journalism has disrupted conventional institutional
boundaries and practices at a time of severe economic and social challenges to the industry.
Citizen journalism calls into question institutionalized presumptions such as that journalism
requires a period of intensive training to do properly, and its corollary claim that legitimate
journalism can only be conducted by people who have completed such training and who work for
established news organizations. Yet, today, non-professionally gathered accounts and images
are increasingly and paradoxically an accepted part of the output of professional news
organizations and their claims to producing an authoritative account of the world’s events.
Granting the complex reasons for this and the complex ways in which it occurs, citizen journalism

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To appear in Oxford Bibliographies, editor-in-chief Patricia Moy. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. This manuscript for general information only; not for direct citation.

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is both a symptom and a cause of the current crisis in journalism economics and cultural
authority, one with great significance for the role of journalism in democratic societies.

General Overviews
Citizen journalism labels the activity of non-professionals practicing journalism. Outing 2005 and
Watson 2011 catalog its varying relationships with professional journalism organizations, from
being curated by them to entirely separate if not overtly critical of them. From the start of scholarly
attention in the early 2000s, the implications of citizen journalism remain contentious and
debated, with the key tensions identified by Allan and Thorsen 2009 (p. 4) posed as a trade-off of
openness versus quality, and democratization versus credibility. Scholars such as Allan 2006 and
Siapera and Veglis 2012 argue that, whatever the position taken, traditional news organizations
must adapt to it or become extinct. By extending journalism and global distribution to conceivably
anyone, citizen journalism calls into question claims that journalism requires extensive training
and/or apprenticeships. By enabling people outside of closed news organizations to gather, write
and distribute information globally, it also wreaks havoc on claims that only professionally trained
journalists can write authoritative accounts, as well as that only traditionally objective-style
reporting is the only way to compose such accounts, a development as Hamilton 2008 argues
with roots in long-standing declines of economic viability and cultural authority. By developing
digital news-gathering in many case as a collective enterprise, Steiner and Roberts 2011 argue it
calls into question the democratic role of news that is a rigidly controlled and managed product.
And, by demonstrating the economic viability of wholly digital journalism available via a screen
rather than printed on paper, citizen journalism also destabilizes traditional means of support
which rely on exclusivity and control. The best recent global survey of these developments is
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2010), which examines in detail the
increasing economic crisis of journalism globally due in great part to the rise of new models of
news creation and distribution made possible by the Internet. While early studies focused
primarily on the United States, scholarship soon addressed a variety of examples in different
countries, underscoring how citizen journalism is shaped by local cultures and news practices.

Allan, Stuart. 2006. Online News; Journalism and the Internet. New York: Open University Press.
Nicely focused account of key episodes in the emergence of citizen journalism, beginning
with journalists’ use of public images in the wake of the Indonesia tsunami disaster of 2004.
Argues that news companies now recognize that the emergence of citizen journalism needs
to be embraced in order for themselves to prosper, if not simply survive.

Allan, Stuart and Einar Thorsen. Eds. 2009. Citizen Journalism; Global Perspectives. New York:
Peter Lang.
Broad, international range of case studies of citizen journalism. The first section contains
examples of citizen journalism used in crises of the moment, and the second section its role
and uses in the course of traditional democratic, parliamentary politics.

Hamilton, James F. 2008. “Market Radicalism and the Struggle for Participation.” Chapter in
Democratic Communications; Formations, Projects, Possibilities, pp. 199-231. Lanham:
Lexington Books.
Provides a critical-historical analysis of the conditions that generated citizen journalism,
viewing it as a recent response to economic and cultural challenges to traditional media
organizations that have been progressively intensifying since the early 20th century.
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Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2010. *The Evolution of News and
the Internet*[http://www.oecd.org/sti/ieconomy/45559596.pdf]*. Paris: OECD.
Addresses the emergence of citizen journalism from the point of view of the news industry,
surveying emerging business models and forms. Concludes that key discussions in many
countries seek a balance between how to help professional news industries survive and
preserving a news industry independent of editorial pressures from patronage sources.

Outing, Steve. 2005. “*The 11 Layers of Citizen


Journalism[http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=83126]*.” Poynter Online.
Differentiates kinds of citizen journalism in terms of the different institutional roles in
professional newsgathering organizations that users are invited to fill, from commenting on
individual stories posted by news organizations, to open-source reporting partnerships,
standalone citizen-journalism projects, and “pro-am” partnerships.

Siapera, Eugenia and Andreas Veglis. Eds. 2012. The Handbook of Global Online Journalism.
Malden: Wiley.
A wide-ranging overview that sees citizen journalism as an outcome of the digitization and
globalization of traditional journalism. Includes discussions of politics, production, practices,
content, and global case studies.

Steiner, Linda, and Jessica Roberts. 2011. “Philosophical Linkages Between Public Journalism
and Citizen Journalism.” In Media Perspectives for the 21st Century, Papathanassopoulos,
Stylianos, Ed., pp. 191-211. New York: Routledge.
Thoughtful discussion of the trajectory of challenges to traditional professionalized
journalism as represented by public journalism of the 1990s and citizen journalism more
recently. Concludes that citizen journalism has much to offer traditional journalism, such as
in boosting lengthy investigative reporting projects, and that professional resistance to
partnering with citizen journalism organizations undermines the profession’s credibility while
it reveals a disdain for democracy.

Watson, Hayley. 2011. “*Preconditions for Citizen Journalism: A Sociological


Assessment[http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/6.html]*.” Sociological Research Online 16 (3) 6.
Conceptually organizes the variety of citizen journalism into efforts of self-publication and
efforts of publication via traditional news media. Identifies key preconditions as digital
technology, a more active audience, a broader digital culture that embraces participation,
and changes in newsroom organization.

Journals
Due to its nature, the most directly relevant research appears in academic journals concerned
with the study of journalism. One group of journals typically publish research that addresses
immediate industry concerns, such as **Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly**,
**Journalism Practice**, and **Newspaper Research Journal**. A second group also focuses on
journalism, but from a more critical and theoretical bent, such as **Journalism: Theory, Practice,
Criticism**, **Journalism Studies**, and **Journal of Mass Media Ethics**. Bridging this group
with a third group is **Digital Journalism**, which focuses on the implications of digitization for the

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industry. The third major group are journals such as **Convergence** and **New Media and
Society**, which place citizen journalism within research on new media technologies.

*Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media


Technologies[http://con.sagepub.com/]*.
International, interdisciplinary forum for research exploring the reception, consumption and
impact of new media technologies in domestic, public and educational contexts. Tends to
take for granted the premise and implications of media convergence as a current and
unprecedented development.

*Digital Journalism[http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rdij20]*.
Established in 2013 as a dedicated forum for international research regarding the impact of
digital technologies on news industries and practices, including that of citizen journalism.
More directly focused on citizen journalism as a result of the emergence of digital networks.

*Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly[http://www.aejmc.org/home/publications/jmc-


quarterly/]*.
Oldest publication of scholarship regarding journalism. Research is typically sympathetic to
professional concerns, commonly social-psychological in approach, and focused on the US.

*Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism[http://jou.sagepub.com/]*.


Publishes theoretically eclectic work that is as critical of media industries as it is supportive.
Research takes a wide a range of approaches, and focuses largely on Europe and the US.

*Journalism Studies[http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjos20/]*.
Affiliated with the Journalism Division of the International Communication Association.
Publishes research in a wide range of approaches and with attention to global
developments.

*Journalism Practice[http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjop20]*.
Focuses on the concrete practice of professional journalism. International in scope.

*Journal of Mass Media Ethics[http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmme20/]*.


Addresses moral and ethical dilemmas and issues regarding media production and practice
across the media industries.

*Newspaper Research Journal[http://www.newspaperresearchjournal.org/]*.


Affiliated with the Newspaper Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and
Mass Communication (AEJMC), a US-centered scholarly organization. Publishes applied
research of concern to US news industry.

*New Media and Society[http://nms.sagepub.com/]*.


Addresses issues regarding digital media and its intersections with industry and society.
Tends to emphasize social-psychological approaches, but publishes research that uses a
variety of methods and approaches. International range.

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Formative Literatures
Scholarship on citizen journalism draws upon conceptual tools and arguments in a number of
different interdisciplinary literatures.

Social Movement Media


Literatures of social movement media and related fields of alternative media and radical media
highlight projects by which non-professionals use media for social change. Studies such as Atton
2002 and Downing et al. 2001 link citizen journalism to labor media, reformist media, the
underground press of the 1960s and the like, which together are seen to criticize and thus oppose
corporatized, professionalized media production. Opel and Pompper 2003, and De Jong, Shaw
and Stammers 2005 document a global range of actors and actions.

Atton, Chris. 2002. Alternative Media. London: Sage.


Early, influential effort to expand the traditional terrain of social-movement media to include
those not expressly political, such as personal ’zines, as well as to update specific case
studies.

Downing, John D.H., Tamara Villarreal Ford, Genève Gil, and Laura Stein. 2001. Radical Media;
Rebellious communication and social movements. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Benchmark revision of an earlier book by a pre-eminent scholar in this area .Views radical
media as generally small-scale efforts in a wide variety of forms (not just news) that “express
an alternative vision to hegemonic policies, priorities, and perspectives.”

De Jong, Wilma, Martin Shaw, and Neil Stammers. Eds. 2005. Global Activism, Global Media.
London: Pluto Press.
International collection that further establishes the need to span many different academic
disciplines in the study of social-movement media. Addresses non-institutionalized forms of
political activity and their use of a wide variety of media, from traditional to digital.
Contributions from activists who are generally more optimistic as well as established
scholars who are generally more pessimistic.

Opel, Andy, and Donnalyn Pompper. Eds. 2003. Representing Resistance: Media, civil
disobedience, and the global justice movement. Westport: Praeger.
Important early collection that establishes the place and role of media activism in the global
justice movement. Individual case studies document the narrow ways that activism which
addresses globalization is represented in order to discount it and thus protect the status quo.
They also explore media use of social movement groups to mobilize resistance.

Cyberactivism
By the early 2000s and following the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 and activists’ formation of
digital self-publishing in the form of Independent Media Centers, scholars such as Platon and
Deuze 2003 felt digital activism would be highly unlikely to affect traditional media organizations.
Couldry and Curran 2003 is an important collection than links the pre-digital with the digital.
Meikle 2002, Van de Donk et al. 2004, Boler 2008 and Joyce 2010, address the range of specific
tactics taken by digital social movements, with McCaughey 2014 and Atton 2004 addressing a

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broader range of everyday uses in popular culture such as fan culture and radio. By late 2000s,
growth of international case studies in areas politically more unsettled institutionally than liberal
western democracies, with the Arab Spring a key one, giving rise to additional efforts such as
Howard 2011 to document and conceptualize cyberactivism as a distinct phenomenon.

Atton, Chris. 2004. An Alternative Internet. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.


Extends the argument in Atton 2002 (cited under *Social Media*) about the need to
recognize alternative media practice in all its forms, not just the overtly political, such as
musician fanzines, Internet radio, along with aesthetic issues of sampling and creativity.

Boler, Megan. Ed. 2008. Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in hard times. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Influential collection that views social movements as generalized social processes of
resistance and challenge dispersed throughout popular culture. Regards tactics as
contextual and specific uses of technology for critical ends.

Couldry, Nick, and James Curran. Eds. 2003. Contesting Media Power; Alternative media in a
networked world. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Wide-ranging collection that, while addressing pre-digital alternative media practice, uses its
final section to address what it terms “new media spaces” enabled by digital technologies,
arguing that digital media alter who can engage social change and at what scale.

Howard, Philip N. 2011. The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information
Technology and Political Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Argues that digital media are necessary but not sufficient conditions for contemporary social
change. Defines cyberactivism as online activity that advances a political cause more easily
than would be the case offline. Goal is to “create intellectually and emotionally compelling
digital artifacts that tell stories of injustice, interpret history, and advocate for particular
political outcomes” (145).

Joyce, Mary. Ed. 2010. Digital Activism Decoded; The new mechanics of change. New York:
International Debate Education Association.
General, readable compilation that summarizes on-the-ground perspectives and knowledge
about digital activism through the late 2000s. Argues that the best guide to action is to apply
already existing strategies of non-digital media for activism to the use of digital media, but to
remain sensitive to the differences between non-digital and digital.

McCaughey, Martha. Ed. 2014. Cyberactivism on the Participatory Web. New York: Routledge.
An update and extension of a 2003 collection. Broadens the range of attention from overt
progressive political movements to a variety of efforts including citizen journalism. Seeks to
investigate and assess the deeper implications of general public participation made possible
by the Internet.

Meikle, Graham. 2002. Future Active: Media activism and the internet. New York: Routledge.
Traces in a series of case studies and interviews the dualities of the Internet as an activist
medium following the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. Concludes that the Internet is an

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additional tool for activists, but not one that should be solely relied upon due to the ability to
monitor and restrict what goes through it.

Platon, Sara, and Mark Deuze. 2003. “Indymedia Journalism: A Radical Way of Making, Selecting
and Sharing News?,” Journalism 4(3): 336-355. [doi: 10.1177/14648849030043005]
Early, influential study of Independent Media Centers. Concludes that the chances are very
slim of its model of open publishing making any inroads in traditional, professional media
organizations. The later emergence of blogs and their centrality for citizen journalism calls in
to question this early, pre-blog conclusion.

Van de Donk, Wim, Brian D. Loader, Paul G. Nixon, and Dieter Rucht. Eds. 2004. Cyberprotest:
New Media, Citizens and Social Movements. New York: Routledge.
An early collection that connects the emergence of transnational global-justice social
movements to the emergence of digital information and communications technologies
(ICTs), a field of extra-institutional political activity heretofore largely ignored by scholars of
ICTs. Of particular interest is how the use of digital technologies shape while shaped by the
way the activist groups operate.

Public Journalism
Public journalism (sometimes known as civic journalism) was a think-tank and industry effort in
the 1990s to include communities more fully in editorial decisions about which issues to cover.
While it shares with citizen journalism an emphasis on greater public participation in journalism, it
expressly limits public participation to offering input into general news agendas rather than
becoming direct involved in reporting and writing. It thus maintains the professional status of
journalism as a means of boosting relevance with readers and correcting a steady slide in
readership and revenues.

Normative arguments
Research regarding public journalism emerged first as a series of normative statements and
commentaries, often supported by civic-minded philanthropic organizations. Rosen 1996 regards
as crucial the need for news organizations to work more closely with their readers and community
to determine together the news agenda, which is a point Friedland 2003 illustrates by way of four
case studies. Black 1997 and Merritt 1998 take issue with the degree to which the professional
standard of objectivity prevents reporters from more fully engaging readers and recognizing ways
that news might help solve social problems. Coleman 1997 traces historically the roots of the
public journalism movement to calls for news organizations to be engaged social players rather
than disconnected observers. Chapters in Eksterowicz and Roberts 2000 illustrate the boundaries
placed on citizens’ role in professional news organizations as simply advising on what news to
cover, not on actually gathering that news, a point that Lambeth, Meyer, and Thorsen 1998 also
make by way of historical analysis. Glasser 1999 is the most authoritative collection regarding
public journalism, with contributions focusing on the conflict created between maintaining
professional standards and allowing greater non-professional input into covering news.
Rosenberry and St. John III 2010 explains the evolution from public journalism to citizen
journalism due largely to the emergence and spread of the Internet and initially of blogging (cited
under *Blogging*).

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Black, Jay. Ed. 1997. Mixed News: The public/civic/communitarian journalism debate. Mahwah:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Collection that views public journalism through the lens of media ethics, with the primary
issue being whether and to what degree the professional requirement for journalists to be
detached observers impairs their ability to improve the world in which they live.

Coleman, Renita. 1997. “The Intellectual Antecedents of Public Journalism.” Journal of


Communication Inquiry 21: 60-76. [doi: 10.1177/019685999702100103].
Traces roots to the early 20th-century debate between John Dewey and Walter Lippmann
regarding the composition and objective of the press, as well as to the 1940s, the Hutchins
Commission and the emergence of the social responsibility theory of the press.

Eksterowicz, Anthony J., and Robert N. Roberts Eds.. 2000. Public Journalism and Political
Knowledge. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Collection of chapters by print and broadcast journalists, and scholars. Views public
journalism as what traditional newsrooms do to allow greater citizen input into news
coverage.

Friedland, Lewis A. 2003. Public Journalism Past and Future. Dayton: Kettering Foundation.
Examines from a general management perspective four case studies of public journalism by
newspapers in medium-sized U.S. cities circa 1990s. Concludes by proposing reasons why
and in what ways these four examples moved public journalism ahead. Sees promise in
public journalism, but depends on deeper cooperation among all parties involved.

Glasser, Theodore. Ed. 1999. The Idea of Public Journalism. New York: Guilford.
Authoritative collection of scholarly commentary circa 1990s about public journalism from
major U.S. scholars. Regards public journalism as a challenge to news industries to take
seriously their role in a democratic polity to foster dependable knowledge, and enable public
debate and functional civic community. Among the key issues addressed is how to be
engaged in the political process and projects for change while retaining professional
authority.

Lambeth, Edmund B., Philip E. Meyer, and Esther Thorsen. Eds. 1998. Assessing Public
Journalism. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Collection that traces lineage to John Dewey, and that documents a series of early projects.
Argues for public journalism as citizen input into news agendas, not direct reporting by non-
professionals.

Merritt, Davis. 1998. Public Journalism and Public Life: Why telling the news is not enough.
Second edition. Mahwah: Erlbaum.
Argues that public journalism requires journalists to help citizens re-engage in public life,
and to enable public deliberation as to how best to address pressing public problems.

Rosen, Jay. 1996. Getting the Connections Right; Public journalism and the troubles of the press.
New York: Twentieth Century Fund.

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Statement by prominent advocate that views public journalism as an engaged mindset and
practice that journalists themselves need to embrace. Solution for journalism’s lack of civic
relevance is to for journalists to work more closely with readers and communities.

Rosenberry, Jack, and Burton St. John III. Eds. 2010. Public Journalism 2.0: The promise and
reality of a citizen-engaged press. New York: Routledge.
Summarizes the trajectory of public journalism from optimistic early days to grounded
criticisms, and its extension via blogging into citizen journalism. Argues that citizen
journalism cannot stand on its own, but needs to retrieve more of public journalism’s
emphasis on professional collaboration if not curation in order for it to more fully deliver on
the liberal role of journalism in a democratic society.

Critical assessments
The early optimistic normative arguments in favor of public journalism were quickly countered by
more moderate if not critical views. Gunaratne 1998, and Bardoel and d’Haenens 2004 reveal the
narrowness of what had been largely a U.S.-centric understanding of public journalism. Hardt
1997 and the special issue Javnost 1996 focus attention on the economic and historical
conditions that drove public journalism in directions self-serving for media industries. While
Williams and Della Carpini 2000, and Nieman Reports 2005 argue that public journalism went too
far, Haas 2007 argues that it did not go far enough.

Bardoel, Jo, and Leen d’Haenens. 2004. “Media Meet the Citizen: Beyond Market Mechanisms
and Government Regulations.” European Journal of Communication 19: 165-194. [doi:
10.1177/0267323104042909].
An important international argument that views public journalism as a U.S.-centric
expression of a larger global problem, which is how to organize a news organization outside
of the residual Cold War choice between commercial system and state-run system.

Gunaratne, Shelton. 1998. “Old Wine in a New Bottle: Public journalism, developmental
journalism, and social responsibility.” Communication Yearbook 21: 277-322.
One of very few studies that casts public journalism in an international light. Develops the
commonalities between public journalism and developmental journalism through reference
to both their adherence to a social-responsibility theory of the press.

Haas, Tanni. 2007. The Pursuit of Public Journalism: theory, practice, and criticism. New York:
Routledge.
Documents the emergence, philosophies and debates regarding public journalism.
Concludes that public journalism helps news organizations connect better with their
audiences, but does much less to connect citizens to their governments and, in that sense,
has clear limits on its ability to democratize public life.

Hardt, Hanno. 1997. “The Quest for Public Journalism.” Journal of Communication 47(3): 94-101.
[doi: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.1997.tb02720.x]
Review essay that places the emergence of public journalism in a context of sagging profit
margins despite ever-increasing pressures for greater profitability. Argues that then-current

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works about public journalism make appeals at a pragmatic level without awareness of
context and history.

“*Journalism at the Crossroads[http://javnost-thepublic.org/issue/1996/3/]*.” 1996. Javnost—The


Public 3.
Critical set of contributions that seek to describe and analyze public journalism as a last
gasp by news industries to simulate public participation while at the same time retain
economic and institutional control of journalism.

Nieman Reports. 2005. “*Citizen Journalism[http://niemanreports.org/issues/winter-2005/]*.”


Cambridge: Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.
Excellent cross section of cases and commentary from scholars and practitioners. Positions
citizen journalism as a partnership with industry rather than an external critical practice on
the outside. Focus is how to organize partnerships between news organizations and their
reading publics.

Williams, Bruce A., and Michael X. Delli Carpini. 2000. “Unchained reaction: The collapse of
media gatekeeping and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.” Journalism 1(1): 61-85. [doi:
10.1177/146488490000100113]
Argues that extending news production outside of professional channels muddies news with
entertainment, fact with opinion, thus imperiling the value of journalism for a democratic
society.

Media convergence
Studies of media convergence focus on the implication of the merging of heretofore separate
institutions, media, and/or technologies. Castells 1996 and Dyer-Witheford 1999 are wide-ranging
historical syntheses that seek to characterize epochal changes in society brought about by the
introduction of digital information technologies, of which one is convergence. Deuze 2007 and
Deuze 2008 argue that convergence enables a greater degree of individual choice and initiative,
which is contrary to the pre-convergence news audience that was limited to reading a handful of
news outlets. Jenkins 2008 argues that convergence is only in part a technological process, and
is much more centrally the emergence of a participatory culture which has enabled us all as our
own media makers, a claim that he argues in Jenkins 2013 has been misconstrued by his critics
as a uniform, overoptimistic endorsement. Among the less sanguine evaluations of media
convergence is Maxwell and Miller 2011, which argues for greater attention paid to the
exploitation of global labor in the making of digital devices which enable media convergence, as
well as to the consequences of planned obsolescence by the consumer-electronics industries
which produces mountains of toxic high-tech trash. Meikle and Young 2012 valuably tease out
various dimensions of media convergence, including that of discrete forms, such as news and
videogames; of discrete formations, such as public and private; and of discrete approaches, such
as objective and subjective. Influential claims of the rise of network society such as Castells 1996
have given rise to more recent works such as Heinrich 2011, which makes epochal claims about
a old, linear model of information delivery being replaced by the current, recursive model of
networked generation and exchange. Meikle and Redden 2011 illustrates the variety of ways that
media convergence works globally on the production and consumption of news, providing
evidence that the effects of media convergence on news are quite variable.

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Dyer-Witheford, Nick. 1999. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and circuits of struggle in high-technology
capitalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
One of the first English-language historical-critical analyses of the potentials of information
technologies for working-class empowerment that puts to use autonomist Marxism.
Information technologies were first developed for military uses, then transferred to systems
of greater workplace control, then later used to diffuse work out from centralized factories to
society at large, generating new sites of contestation and power.

Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Widely cited argument that addresses what it sees as the evolution of the information
society into the network society, shaped by the structure of networks instead of actions
taken within and through them. Network culture is prefigured in the structure of computer-
mediated communication networks; despite efforts to regulate and privatize them, such
networks and the emerging society are increasingly multifaceted, decentralized and flexible
(357-8).

Deuze, Mark. 2007. “Convergence culture in the creative industries.” International Journal of
Cultural Studies 10: 243-263. [doi: 10.1177/1367877907076793]
Foundational argument about the institutional changes in the wake of convergence and an
increasingly participatory media culture.

Deuze, Mark. 2008. “*The Changing Context of News Work: Liquid Journalism and Monitorial
Citizenship[http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/download/290/197]*.” International Journal of
Communication 2.
Claims that liberal press theory of civic-minded publics informing themselves broadly has
been replaced by that of citizen-consumers who are makers and users of their own news.

Heinrich, Ansgard. 2011. Network Journalism; Journalistic practice in interactive spheres. New
York: Routledge.
Study of broad societal changes and their impact on journalism texts, process, and industry
structure. Argues that the primary features of network journalism are increased speed of
newswork and its globalization.

Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Convergence Culture; where old and new media collide. New York: New
York University Press.
Influential argument that asserts that new, digital media will not replace older ones, but will
merge with them in unforeseen ways. Convergence is seen as not only a technological
process but also a cultural and organizational one, as well as one driven top-down by
corporations and at the same time bottom-up by users and consumers.

Jenkins, Henry. 2013. “Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture’.” Cultural Studies 28: 267-
297. [doi: 10.1080/09502386.2013.801579].
Article-length response to critics. Argues that any excess in emphasis on the empowerment
of audiences was due to the need to counter reigning overemphasis on their passivity.

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Suggests that his position is actually quite similar to critics and that he shares concerns
about media institutions bending audience work to their own benefit.

Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. 2011. “Old, New, and Middle-Aged Media Convergence.”
Cultural Studies 25: 585-703. [doi: 10.1080/09502386.2011.600550].
Historical, critical argument. Asserts that hopes for convergence to bring about increased
efficiency, greater connectedness and global interactivity are greatly exaggerated if not
diametrically opposed to the reality. Argues for the need to recover awareness of coercive
labor and ecological damage that supports it.

Meikle, Graham, and Guy Redden. Eds. 2011. News Online: Transformations and continuities.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Collection of a range of evaluations by leading scholars. Views the shift into digital
production and distribution as remapping the lines between professional and amateur, and
as creating new kinds of cultural and political relations of participation.

Meikle, Graham, and Sherman Young. 2012. Media Convergence: Networked digital media in
everyday life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
An exploration of everyday uses of networked digital media. Argues that the convergent
media environment has done little to significantly challenge the power and size of media
companies. Such organizations survive if not also thrive by experimenting with new ways of
incorporating user-generated content such as citizen journalism in beneficial ways.

Perspectives
Since the emergence of scholarship on citizen journalism in 2000s, three general scholarly
interpretations have emerged in roughly chronological order, although co-existing today. First,
what could be called a radical-democratic view regards citizen journalism as a criticism of
professional exclusivity, and a challenge to its privilege and the resulting narrowness of news
coverage. It traces citizen journalism to long-standing forms and traditions of activist and social
movement media. A second interpretation, which could be called a media-management view,
regards citizen journalism as an emerging stage of consumer empowerment needing to be
accommodated and managed as part of the normal process of business innovation. It traces
citizen journalism to broader trends in marketing as accelerated by digital technologies. A third
interpretation takes what could be called a hybrid view, which emphasizes citizen journalism as a
contentious field in which non-professional work modifies and at the same time is modified by
professionalized work.

Radical-democratic perspective
The initial set of studies of citizen journalism viewed it as a popular digital information insurgency
that emerged outside and independent of professional news organizations. Gillmour (2004) is the
earliest and most influential such statement, arguing that citizen journalism expresses a newly
found agency for individual citizens to exert influence in the political sphere. Other scholarship
focuses more on collective instead of individual action, such as Rodriguez 2001 seeing it as a
type of citizens media, or Howley 2005 and Forde 2011 seeing it as a variant of community
media. Still other studies such as Downing 2011 broaden communities further, regarding them as
a variant of social movements. And Drew 2013 regards as Barlow 2007 (cited under *Blogging*)

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does that citizen journalism is a recent expression of a long-standing need for publics to free
themselves from the confines of corporate media.

Downing, John D.H. Ed. 2011. Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
The authoritative compendium of capsule case studies from around the world, as well as
brief presentations of key concepts and phenomena related to social movement media.
Citizen journalism is seen as a subset of citizens’ media, which refers to a wide range of
efforts by popular social movements to exert their influence.

Drew, Jesse. 2013. A Social History of Contemporary Democratic Media. New York: Routledge.
Infers a definition of citizen journalism as newsgathering and distribution entirely outside
professional media organizations. It is an historical commentary that argues that the
challenges to centrally controlled media companies came from a combination of
technological innovation pioneered by technology companies as well as artistic and activist
interventions of the past few decades, culminating in the emergence of digital networks.

Forde, Susan. 2011. Challenging the News: The journalism of alternative and community media.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Detailed study of cases and practices in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United
States. Although it can be practiced in many different kinds of news organizations from
traditional to radical-democratic, alternative journalism is defined as that which encourages
readers to participate, prioritizes news immediately relevant to its local audience, seeks to
uncover what typically is not covered, and critiques news and its processes.

Gillmour, Dan. 2004. *We, the Media; Grassroots journalism by the people, for the
people[http://oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/]*. Sebastopol: O’Reilly.
Cited widely as a foundational argument that defines citizen journalism as the liberatory
powers of technologies wedded to grassroots news. Takes an individualist, libertarian view
of political activity.

Howley, Kevin. 2005. Community Media; People, places, and communication technologies.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Theoretically sophisticated analysis of historical conditions, to which communities and
community media are a response. Locates the impetus for community media in the
consolidation and narrowing of commercial and state-owned media companies and systems

Rodriguez, Clemencia. 2001. Fissures in the Mediascape; An International Study of Citizens’


Media. Cresskill: Hampton Press.
International participant study of variety of organizations and subaltern peoples who are
structurally excluded from centers of decision-making to challenge concentrations of power.
Regards citizen journalism as a variation of citizen media. Focus on Latin America.

Media-management perspective
Parallel with the radical democratic view chronologically is what could be called a media-
management view. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development 2007, Brock 2013,
and the Project for Excellence in Journalism regard citizen journalism as a challenge to the

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economic and institutional viability of professional media organizations, but with the solution one
of accommodation, integration and mutual change. King 2010, Kovach and Rosenstiel 2010,
McChesney 2013, and Patterson 2013 view this challenge as a threat that must be resisted
because it undermines the role of journalism in a democratic society as a dependable source of
information upon which to make informed decisions. While not denying the scale of the challenge,
Bowman and Willis 2003 view it as an opportunity that surely will change journalism, but that can
be turned to advantage via innovative management. If professionally managed, Anderson, Ogola
and Williams 2014, and Tewksbury and Rittenberg 2012 argue that citizen journalism as an act of
co-creation by news organizations and their readers can help news organizations expand
coverage.

Anderson, Peter J., George Ogola, and Michael Williams. Eds. 2014. The Future of Quality News
Journalism: A cross-continental analysis. New York: Routledge.
Locates citizen journalism within the broader problem of providing quality journalism in a
rapidly changing media environment. Concludes that news organizations need to change to
adapt to new social and economic demands, and that these adaptations differ according to
context.

Bowman, Shayne and Chris Willis. 2003. *We Media; How Audiences are Shaping the Future of
News and Information[http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/download/we_media.pdf]*. The Media
Center, American Press Institute.
An early, wide-ranging report on citizen journalism directed at those in the news industries.
Describes citizen journalism as only one variation of consumer-centered marketing. Urges
professionalized news organizations to adopt a more consumer-centered openness in order
to maintain if not also build audiences and markets.

Brock, George. 2013. Out of Print: Newspapers, journalism and the business of news in the
digital age. London: Kogan Page.
account from a management point of view concerning the steady hemorrhaging of the
commercial news business due to economic and technological change and what news
organizations should do about it. Concludes with a defense of the traditional role of
journalism as the arbiter and distributor of dependable facts.

King, Elliot. 2010. Free for All; The Internet’s transformation of journalism. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
A technology-centered argument and historical case that places citizen journalism in a
broader context of the development of computer-based communication and how news
organizations have sought to use them. Concludes that the problems of credibility and
veracity will continue to plague citizen journalism to its detriment.

Kovach, Bill and Tom Rosenstiel. 2010. Blur: How to know what’s true in the age of information
overload. New York: Bloomsbury.
Case by two long-time journalists documenting the deleterious effects of unmediated citizen
journalism and deprofessionalization of newswriting on the veracity and authority of
information. Concludes with a call to retain traditional professional journalistic values despite
the changes taking place due in part to the rise of citizen journalism.

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McChesney, Robert W. 2013. Digital Disconnect: How capitalism is turning the Internet against
democracy. New York: New Press.
A wide-ranging argument by a prominent scholar in the field of critical political economy of
the media. Critical of claims that citizen journalism today (defined as that which is unpaid)
provides a viable means of democratic intelligence and debate. Argues that large-scale
public investment in journalism non-profit organizations is what is needed.

Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2007. *Participative Web and User-
created content; Web. 2.0, wikis and social
networking[http://browse.oecdbookshop.org/oecd/pdfs/free/9307031e.pdf]*. Paris: OECD.
Global study that describes the implications of the emerging digital environment for
businesses and users. Concludes by calling for cooperation among business, users, and
government to maximize benefits.

Project for Excellence in Journalism. 2004-2013. *State of the News Media; An annual report on
American journalism[http://stateofthemedia.org/]*. New York: Pew Research Center.
The best yearly resource regarding the economic health of US news industries, including the
challenge of citizen journalism. The 2014 report notes among other developments the
degree to which non-traditional news organizations such as BuzzFeed and Mashable are
hiring experienced journalists and becoming more like traditional news organizations.

Patterson, Thomas E. 2013. Informing the News: the need for knowledge-based journalism. New
York: Vintage. PN4788 .P38 2013.
Strongly worded defense of professionalized journalism as the arbiter and validator of facts
needed for intelligent political decisionmaking.

Tewksbury, David, and Jason Rittenberg. 2012. News on the Internet: information and citizenship
in the 21st century. New York: Oxford University Press.
Usefully synthesizes a wide variety of literatures. Views digitization of journalism as both a
means of extending professional delivery of news as well as for citizens to participate in
news production and circulation.

Hybridized perspective
The most recently developed perspective represented by Atton and Hamilton 2008, Volkmer and
Firdaus 2013 and Wall 2012 views citizen journalism as a facet of a broader, changing journalistic
practice of great complexity. Thorsen and Allan 2014 documents how citizen journalism changes
while at the same time is changed by its encounter with traditional journalism. In doing so, Kim
and Hamilton 2006, Atton 2013, and Howley 2013 argue that assumptions of traditional
journalism as conservative if not reactionary, citizen journalism as de facto progressive, and the
implicit equivalence of commercial organization with traditional journalism must be questioned.
Miladi 2011, and Xin 2010 recognize that citizen journalism does indeed challenge traditional
news organizations, but only to a certain extent. Robinson and DeShano 2011 argue that the
distinctions between traditional and citizen journalism are no longer useful.

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Atton, Chris. 2013. “Separate, Supplementary or Seamless?: Alternative News and Professional
Journalism.” In Rethinking Journalism Trust and Participation in a Transformed News Landscape.
Edited by Chris Peters, and Marcel Broersma, 131-143. New York: Routledge.
Examines how newer ways of doing journalism are interacting with established forms.
Concludes that the emergence of citizen journalism as assisted by professionalized media
may be fruitful location for alternative media practices.

Atton, Chris, and James F. Hamilton. 2008. Alternative Journalism. London: Sage.
Widely cited book-length study of the emerging landscape of journalism. Regards citizen
journalism as part of a wholesale, but variable reformulation of journalistic practice in the
wake of political challenges to traditional journalistic authority, economic challenges to
traditional models of financing and support, and technological challenges due to digitization.

Howley, Kevin. Ed. 2013. Media Interventions. New York: Peter Lang.
International collection of case studies of interrelationships between traditional media
industries and services, and their often unintended use for progressive political purposes.
Views hybridity for radical as well as conventional uses as an always present potential in
any media organization.

Kim, Eun-Gyoo, and James F. Hamilton. 2006. “Capitulation to Capital? OhmyNews as


Alternative Media.” Media, Culture & Society 28: 541–560. [doi: 10.1177/0163443706065028].
Provides a critical social history of Korean citizen news site OhmyNews as an outcome of
the particular generational politics of Korea. Documents how it comprises a hybrid citizen-
professional news organization in means of funding as well as organization, thus illustrating
that alternative media and mainstream media are not always mutually exclusive.

Miladi, Noureddine. 2011. “New Media and the Arab Revolution: Citizen Reporters and Social
Activism.” Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research 4: 113-119. [doi: 10.1386/jammr.4.2-
3.113_2].
Commentary that places citizen journalism as part of the Arab Spring in political and
institutional context. Views it as crucial in countering government perspectives and its
justification for actions taken against protesters.

Robinson, Sue, and Cathy DeShano. 2011. “‘Anyone Can Know’: Citizen Journalism and the
Interpretive Community of the Mainstream Press.” Journalism 12: 963-982. [doi:
10.1177/1464884911415973].
Differences between the two groups result from distinct interpretive communities each
constructed to justify their practice and relation with the other. Concludes that citizen
journalism and professional journalism should be theorized together, for they are for all
intensive purposes merged in practice.

Thorsen, Einar and Stuart Allan, eds. 2014. Citizen Journalism; Global Perspectives; Volume 2.
New York: Peter Lang.
To a greater degree than Allan and Thorsen 2009 (see *General Overviews*), the wide-
ranging international case studies in this collection document the complex negotiations in
labor and form between citizen journalists and professionalized news outlets.

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Volkmer, Ingrid and Amira Firdaus. 2013. “Between Networks and ‘Hierarchies of Credibility’:
Navigating Journalistic Practice in a Sea of User-Generated Content.” In Rethinking Journalism
Trust and Participation in a Transformed News Landscape. Edited by Chris Peters, and Marcel
Broersma, 101-113. New York: Routledge.
Important effort to reframe the debate from that of citizens versus professionals, to one of a
decentralized networked ecology of news production in which national professional
journalism merges with user-driven media platforms including citizen journalism in an
“increasingly complex professional transnational space” (101).

Xin, Xin. 2010. “The Impact of ‘Citizen Journalism’ on Chinese Media and Society.” Journalism
Practice 4(3): 333-344. [doi: 10.1080/17512781003642931].
An important pioneering study of a major non-Western country. Concludes that citizen
journalism is a new professional outlet as well as a separate source for politically sensitive
material, although not able on its own to foment change.

Wall, Melissa. Ed. 2012. Citizen Journalism: Valuable, useless or dangerous? New York:
International Debate Education Association.
Well-focused and wide-ranging thematic anthology of previously published scholarly
international case studies of citizen journalism. Regards citizen journalism as only one way
that newswork is being reconfigured in the wake of digitization and globalization.

Blogging
Initial research on blogging investigated the extent of its adoption and of bloggers’ motivations,
little of which initially focused on citizen journalism. Kumar et al. 2004 found that the bloggers in
particular age ranges typically share characteristic interests, with none being journalism.
Similarly, Lenhart and Fox 2006 found blogging among adults to be focused primarily on their
personal lives, with a much greater interest in reading news online than in attempting to produce
and circulate journalism of their own. By contrast, Gillmour 2004 (discussed in *Radical-
democratic perspective*) advocates the use of blogs for citizen journalism as a grassroots
challenge to the exclusivity of corporate news production. Similarly, both Deuze 2006 and Nip
2006 note the central role of blogs as deepening the public involvement in journalism compared
to public journalism. The emerging debate about blogging paralleled broader debates about the
value of citizen journalism (discussed in *Perspectives*). By connecting blogging to earlier forms
and examples of civic publication, Barlow 2007 claims that blogging fulfills the long-standing
promise of a polity informed by its citizens. By contrast, Perlmutter and McDaniel 2005 and
Sunstein 2007 argue that increased public participation in journalism is more of a problem than a
solution, because the lack of institutional editing and fact-checking prevents blogs from validating
their information, thus limiting their ability to substitute for professional news coverage. Recent
research examines and documents the variety of specific uses of blogs by citizen journalists.
Bruns 2005 suggests that the predominant activity of citizen-journalism blogs is not so much
original reporting as the selection, recirculation and evaluation of the output of traditional news
organizations. Similarly, chapters in Tremayne 2007 present a variety of case studies that
characterize more precisely citizen-journalism blogs along dimensions defined by degree of
citizen authorship and intention. Examples provided by Rettberg 2014 suggest how the debate
about truthfulness of citizen-journalism blogs downplays the fact that they only continue to grow,

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despite this debate. Bruns 2008 argues that citizen blogging is only one facet of the much
broader emergence of what he calls produsage as a new form of media work in which production
and usage are combined.

Barlow, Aaron. 2007. The Rise of the Blogosphere. Westport: Praeger.


Historical commentary that locates the emergence of blogs as the latest stage in the history
of journalism as the effort to free itself from the narrow bounds of corporate interests. Argues
that blogs revive a model of journalism that existed in the U.S. in the early 18th Century.
Average citizens as amateurs have renewed their place as important contributors to public
debate.

Bruns, Axel. 2005. Gatewatching: Collaborative online news production. New York: Peter Lang.
Argues that an evolving role of the public enabled by the Internet is to continuously monitor
and prioritize the value of relevant content wherever it is produced, thus eliminating the need
for professional journalism as an arbiter and definer of valid, authoritative information.

Bruns, Axel. 2008. Blogs, wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond: From production to produsage.
New York: Peter Lang Press.
Argues that the rise of blogs is only one example of the broader trend toward produsage,
which describes the merging of production and usage. Where chapter 4 builds upon earlier
work which sees blogs’ place in citizen journalism as that of gatewatching and collaborative
reporting, chapter 10 addresses the implications for traditionally organized media industries.

Deuze 2006. ‘Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principal Components of a


Digital Culture’, The Information Society 22(2): 63-75. [doi: 10.1080/01972240600567170]
Views audience blogging as driven by discontent with traditional news. This study focuses
on the blogging subgenre of journalistic weblogs, which interfaces with journalism.

Kumar, Ravi, Jasmine Novak, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Andrew Tomkins. 2004. “*Structure and
Evolution of Blogspace[http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1035162]*.” Communications of the
ACM 47(12): 35-39. [doi: 10.1145/1035134.1035162]
A study of the profile pages of 1.3 million bloggers. Notes that most bloggers live in the U.S.
and Canada; three of four are teens or young adults; and journalism is not prominent
enough to be listed as a representative interest.

Lenhart, Amanda, and Susannah Fox. 2006. “*Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet’s New
Storytellers[http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-
media//Files/Reports/2006/PIP%20Bloggers%20Report%20July%2019%202006.pdf.pdf]*.”
Washington, D.C.: PEW Internet.
Telephone survey of nationally representative sample of bloggers in the U.S. Suggests that
blogging is a marginal experience for adults. Only eight percent of Internet users, about 12
million adults, have a blog, and the most popular topic to blog about (37 percent) is one’s life
and experiences. While only one-third see it as a form of journalism, three of four seek news
online.

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Nip, Joyce Y.M. 2006. “Exploring the Second Phase of Public Journalism.” Journalism Studies
7(2): 212-236. [doi: 10.1080/14616700500533528].
An oft-cited account that establishes the line between citizen journalism and professional
newsgathering as defined by the use of blogging. What citizen journalism lacks by
comparison to public journalism is the latter’s emphasis on dialog and deliberation. What
citizen journalism needs is a greater ability to overlap online participation with offline.

Perlmutter, David D., and Misti McDaniel. 2005. “*The Ascent of


Blogging[http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/100641/The-Ascent-of-Blogging.aspx]*.”
Nieman Report 59(3): 60-64.
Retrospective analysis on the rise of blogging and how traditional news organizations were
trying to adapt to it to their advantage. Recommends that they should first analyze clearly
what blogs do well as a basis for informed decisions on how best to respond to them.
Regardless, traditional professional news values should never be relinquished in order to
accommodate the rise of blogs.

Rettberg, Jill Walker. 2014. Blogging. Second edition. Cambridge: Polity.


Succinct, readable conceptual and historical overview. Chapter 4 discusses the
interrelationships between blogging and journalism. Good summary of legal implications in
the US. Argues that whether all blogs are journalism is beside the point; many do not
presume to follow the canons of professional objectivity in the first place. What is
unequivocal is how blogging as a form of digital participatory culture is remaking the
journalistic enterprise.

Sunstein, Cass R. 2007. Republic.com 2.0; Revenge of the blogs. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Wide-ranging commentary by prominent legal scholar. Argues that, while blogs extend the
range of views on any one topic, they much less often allow for information exchange that
enables better validation of truthfulness or worth, while also encouraging the public to seek
and read only what it already agrees with.

Tremayne, Mark. Ed. 2007. Blogging, Citizenship, and the Future of Media. London: Routledge.
Collection of a variety of studies on political blogs’ content and use. One prominent role is to
select certain news items for recirculation to its readers. Another is to circumvent traditional
media organizations entirely and present original reporting or commentary. Suggests by way
of conclusion a number of ways traditional media organizations are incorporating blogging
so as to benefit from it.

Motivations
Early studies document citizen journalism as a low priority for most bloggers. Nardi et al. 2004 is
an ethnography of blogging by 23 ordinary bloggers writing for very small audiences, concluding
that blogs are much more commonly used for personal expression than for public news reporting.
Huang 2007 elaborates Nardi et al. 2004, by proposing that many motivations are relevant
simultaneously. Bergström 2008 goes even further by arguing that even bloggers who participate
in news organizations digitally rarely do their own reporting, preferring instead to read others’

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accounts. Robinson and Deshano 2011 identify affective motivations rather than civic ones as
crucial for citizen journalists.

Bergström, Annika. 2008. “*The Reluctant Audience: Online participation in the Swedish
journalistic context[http://www.westminster.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0012/20019/005WPCC-
Vol5-No2-Annika_Bergstrom.pdf]*.” Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 5(2): 60-
80.
Finds relatively little public interest in creating content for news sites. Those who do
participate see it largely as a leisure activity rather than as one contributing to democratic
life.

Huang, Chun-Yao, Yong-Zheng Shen, Hong-Xiang Lin, and Shin-Shin Chang. 2007. “Bloggers'
Motivations and Behaviors: A Model.” Journal of Advertising Research 47(4): 472-484. [doi:
10.2501/S0021849907070493]
Address links between motivation and behavior. Finds that behavior of social interaction
driven by motivations of self-expression, life documenting and commenting. Behavior of
content gathering driven by motivations of commenting, forum participating, and information
seeking.

Nardi, Bonnie A., Diane J. Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht, and Luke Swartz. 2004. “*Why We
Blog[http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2004/12/6358-why-we-blog/fulltext]*.” Communications of
the ACM 47(12): 41-46. [doi: 10.1145/1035134.1035163]
Initial, descriptive effort based on responses to in-depth interviews in order to understand
the motivations of bloggers, the vast majority of whom written by “ordinary people” for very
small if not personal audiences. Five major motivations were documenting one’s life, offering
commentary and opinion, expressing emotions, articulating ideas, and participating in
community forums.

Robinson, Sue, and Cathy Deshano. 2011. “Citizen Journalists and Their Third Places.”
Journalism Studies 12: 642-657. [doi: 10.1080/1461670X.2011.557559].
Investigates feelings of affinity common to a particular kind of place of intimate community
gathering place. While some indeed felt this, others were disoriented by the disjunction
between offline and online and thus did not participate.

Blogs and news production


One key area of scholarly attention concerns the variety of ways blogs come to be used by and
within news organizations. Matheson 2004 and Lowrey 2006 examine the degrees of coincidence
of styles of newswriting between blogs and professionally produced news, while Domingo and
Heinonen 2008 study the range of institutional roles. The ultimate nature of this relation remains
debated, with positions ranging from Mohamed 2011 that claims citizen journalism bloggers
oppose traditional news organizations, to Kperogi 2011 who documents how CNN incorporates
citizen journalism and Singer 2005 who finds that even bloggers that are independent of
traditional news organizations nevertheless replicate traditional professionalized story norms.

Domingo, David, and Ari Heinonen. 2008. “Weblogs and Journalism: A Typology to Explain
Blurring Boundaries.” Nordicom Review 29(1): 3-15.

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Not all blogs aspire to journalism, but those that do challenge professional standards and
exclusivity of ownership and practice. They exist in variable relation to professional news
organizations, from being on the one hand produced by the public entirely separate from
media companies to blogs curated by professional news organizations.

Kperogi, Farooq. 2011. “Cooperation with the Corporation? CNN and the Hegemonic Cooptation
of Citizen Journalism through iReport.com.” New Media & Society 13: 314-329.
[doi:10.1177/1461444810373530].
Addresses Cable News Network’s use of user-generated news via its curated service
iReport. Concludes that the function of iReport is to expand news coverage and boost value
for little added expense.

Lowrey, Wilson. 2006. “Mapping the Journalism–Blogging Relationship.” Journalism 7(4): 477-
500. [doi: 10.1177/1464884906068363]
Concludes that the organization and practice traditional journalism organizations and
blogging citizen journalists overlaps in key ways. While traditional journalism seeks to
maintain its long-standing practices, this effort prevents it from expanding into competing
areas now occupied by blogging citizen journalists.

Matheson, Donald. 2004. “Weblogs and the Epistemology of the News: Some Trends in Online
Journalism.” New Media and Society 6(4): 443-468. [doi: 10.1177/146144804044329]
Addresses changes in definitions of news and claims to knowledge and truth brought about
by the emergence of blogging citizen journalists. Describes ways that the relation between
professional journalism and its users is remapped into a more dialogical, active form.

Mohamed, Ali Sayed. 2011. "On the Road to Democracy: Egyptian Bloggers and the Internet
2010." Journal of Arab and Muslim Media Research 4(2/3): 253-272. [doi: 10.1386/jammr.4.2-
3.253_1]
Analysis of interviews with bloggers, human-rights activists and journalists in Egypt in 2009.
Helping reform traditional journalism, which is tightly controlled in this case. Also to critique
the political order and mobilize public opinion against the regime.

Singer, Jane B. 2005. “The Political J-Blogger; ‘Normalizing’ a new media form to fit old norms
and practices.” Journalism 6(2): 173-198. [doi: 10.1177/1464884905051009]
Explores the degree to which political-journalism bloggers seek to replicate professional
journalism standards and routines. Concludes that most write their blogs in ways consistent
with traditional journalism, fulfilling a gatekeeping role as information providers despite the
ability of blogs to engage in dialog.

Blogs and political journalism


An influential stream of research concerns how bloggers as non-professionals come to be in the
case of political communication as if not more influential than traditional journalism. A difference
of opinion exists between scholars who see blogs as distinct from professional journalism and
thus rivaling it, and those who see the two as merged in key ways and thus not in conflict with
each other. On one hand, Carlson 2007 argues that blogs are distinct as well as faulty due to the
lack of traditional journalistic fact-checking. Trammell and Keshelashvili 2005 argue that what

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sets blogs apart from traditional news reporting is that they contain much greater information
about the writer. On the other hand, Farrell and Drezner 2008 argue that no clear dividing line
exists between bloggers and journalists, as many of the most influential blogs are those written by
journalists. Perlmutter 2007 and Lawson-Borders and Kirk 2005 agree, arguing that blogs are
used for a variety of purposes, only one of which is citizen journalism. Graves 2007 points out
that blogs and news refer to and rely on each other. Park 2009 points out that bloggers and
journalists are related in their opposition to each other, in the sense that bloggers are connected
to journalists through their mutual criticism of each other.

Carlson, Matt. 2007. “Blogs and Journalistic Authority: The role of blogs in U.S. election day 2004
coverage.” Journalism Studies 8(2): 264-279. [doi: 10.1080/14616700601148861]
Examines the many different positions and roles of blogs in the political-information process.
Professional news organizations used some blogs’ decision to post results of faulty exit polls
as evidence of blogs’ failure to provide dependable information, thus bolstering the status
and authority of traditional journalism.

Farrell, Henry, and Daniel W. Drezner. 2008. “The Power and Politics of Blogs.” Public Choice
134: 15-30. [doi: 10.1007/s11127-007-9198-1]
Although blogs as a whole have far fewer readers than traditional news outlets, they exert
an influence far greater than readership size would suggest. A handful of prominent blogs
garner the majority of readers, many of whom are journalists. They operate both as sources
as well as guides to allocating attention and reporting budgets.

Graves, Lucas. 2007. “The Affordances of Blogging: A case study in culture and technological
effects.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 31(4): 331-346. [doi: 10.1177/0196859907305446]
Takes a cultural, interactionist view regarding news blogs. Describes many instances in
which news blogs and traditional journalism overlap and rely on each other. Suggests that
blogs have the freedom to post varieties of accounts, debates regarding which contribute to
the emergence of the most authoritative account.

Lawson-Borders, Gracie, and Rita Kirk. 2005. “Blogs in Campaign Communication.” American
Behavioral Scientist 49(4): 548-559. [doi: 10.1177/0002764205279425]
Addresses the emergent use of blogs in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Suggests a
variety of forms and uses of political blogs, from a social diary to an organizing tool and
citizen journalism. Concludes that political blogs will continue to exert influence in the
political process.

Park, David W. 2009. “*Blogging With Authority: Strategic Positioning in Political


Blogs[http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/355/308]*." International Journal Of
Communication 3: 250-273.
Study of mention of bloggers in mainstream news media. Concludes that they derive their
authority not by mimicking professional journalism, but largely by opposing themselves to
mainstream journalism and highlighting their own anti-professionalism.

Perlmutter, David D. 2008. Blogwars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Addresses the emergence and forms of political blogging as a merger of opinion and
commentary, journalism, and online activism. Notes the contradiction in their use between
promoting particular candidates and causes, and assisting reasoned debate and discussion.

Trammell, Kaye D., and Ana Keshelashvili. 2005. “Examining the New Influencers: A self
presentation study of A-list blogs.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 82(4): 968-
982. [doi: 10.1177/107769900508200413]
Content analysis of the most-linked-to blogs. Suggests that what makes such blogs popular
and thus influential is that they establish trust and credibility by including a significant
amount of self-identification and disclosure.

Other Technologies
Following the emergence of blogging and its use by citizen journalists, additional technologies
have emerged as valuable as well. Studies of citizen journalism and these technologies generally
conclude that all are subject to the same kinds of institutional pressures and relations as is
blogging.

Social media and spot news


Scholars argue that generally that the specific kind of digital medium used affects citizen
journalism carried on through it. Where Akoh and Ahiabenu 2012 portray a relatively broad range
of citizen-journalism forms enabled by digital media, and Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira
2012 suggest that the forms of use become in practice so diverse as to be impossible to
categorize, other scholars suggest that the range is more directly determined. Khamis and
Vaughn 2011 argue that different social media are used in different ways in conjunction with
reporting done by citizen journalists involved in social movements. Allan 2006 takes a position
shared by many that first-person accounts and recordings of breaking-news events are the most
commonly accepted citizen journalism products used by professional journalism organizations. In
a similar claim, Murthy 2011 suggest the value to professional news of citizen tweets for
breaking-news accounts. Soo Jung and Hadley 2014 found that television journalism uses
citizen-journalist contributions from digital media differently than does print journalism.

Akoh, Ben, and Kwami Ahiabenu II. 2012. “A Journey Through 10 Countries.” Journalism Practice
6(3): 349-365. [doi: 10.1080/17512786.2012.663598]
A study of the multiple uses of social media in the context of national elections in a selection
of African countries. Citizen journalists in 10 African countries used multiple social media
during elections to distribute original accounts, as well as to aggregate content from political
parties and other political institutions and organizations. On occasion they also provided
breaking news and set the news agenda for traditional news services.

Allan, Stuart. 2013. Citizen Witnessing; Revisioning journalism in times of crisis. Cambridge:
Polity.
Focuses on the growing importance for professional news organizations of non-
professionals recording and observing events. With digital, networked technologies, citizen
journalists have become useful if not central for relaying breaking news of significant,
unforeseen events, underpinning the discursive, yet paradoxical authority of first-hand
reporting.

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Khamis, Sahar, and Katherine Vaughn. 2011. “‘We Are All Khaled Said’: The potentials and
limitations of cyberactivism in triggering public mobilization and promoting political change.”
Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research 4(2/3): 145–163. [doi: 10.1386/jammr.4.2-3.145_1]
Examines the contradictory uses of social media in the Arab Spring protests. In the pre-
revolutionary phase, Facebook was used to increase awareness and create motivation, but
by circulating news, pictures and videos that documented police brutality and government
corruption.

Murthy, Dhiraj. 2011. “Twitter: Microphone for the masses?.” Media, Culture and Society 33(5):
779-789. [doi: 10.1177/0163443711404744]
Examines Twitter as a form of journalism. Concludes that what best describes it is ordinary
people writing news that is read by other ordinary people. However, also suggests that
breaking-news stories posted on Twitter simply alert readers to events that they later follow
in much more detail in traditional news media.

Papacharissi, Zizi, and Maria de Fatima Oliveira. 2012. “Affective news and networked publics:
The rhythms of news storytelling on #Egypt.” Journal of Communication 62(2): 266–282. [doi:
10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01630.x]
Examines patterns of Twitter postings before and after the removal of Hosni Mubarak from
power. Identifies for Twitter a key role in breaking news, particularly political upheavals and
natural disasters, as well as in mobilization and coordination of activism. Its use combines
news, opinion, and emotion to the point that each is hard to distinguish from the other.

Soo Jung, Moon, and Patrick Hadley. 2014. “Routinizing a New Technology in the Newsroom:
Twitter as a News Source in Mainstream Media.” Journal Of Broadcasting & Electronic Media
58(2): 289-305. [DOI: 10.1080/08838151.2014.906435]
Addresses the use of Twitter in news media. Finds that it is a key component in many
newsrooms. Journalists use Twitter as an early-warning alert system to emerging news
stories. Television news used Twitter more heavily as sole or primary source than print. And
both used Twitter more frequently in soft news than hard news. While newspapers used it
for interesting, soft news, television used it for serious, hard news of politics, economy,
crime and disaster.

Smart phones and images


Scholarly attention turned as well to citizen journalists’ use of camera-equipped smart phones
with their capability to send images directly and immediately from events. Verclas and Mechael
2008 is an early effort to catalog different uses and cases, building upon earlier work such as
Allan 2006 (cited under *General Overviews*) and Robinson 2009 regarding the general form of
witnessing. Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti 2011 is a wide-ranging collection of such work.
Where Hänska-Ahy and Shapour 2012 documents how traditional news organizations make use
of user-generated images, Anderson 2012 finds that citizen-gathered images were more credible
for professional journalism use than citizen-gathered verbal accounts. How and why activists as
well as news organizations find images so compelling is continuing to be explored in Andén-
Papadopoulos and Pantti 2013, Andén-Papadopoulos 2013, and Andén-Papadopoulos 2014.

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Andersen, Rune. 2012. “Remediating #IRANELECTION.” Journalism Practice 6: 317-336. [doi:
10.1080/17512786.2012.663593].
Analyzes the use by two Danish newspapers of user-gathered images and verbal accounts
regarding the crackdown on pro-democracy activists following the Iranian election of 2009.
Newspapers related themselves to user contributions as illustrations, rumor, source or
reportage, each of which positioned the veracity of the user account differently. User-
generated images were positioned as more accurate and credible than user-generated
verbal accounts.

Andén-Papadopoulos, Kari. 2013. “Media Witnessing and the ‘Crowd-Sourced Video


Revolution’.” Visual Communication 12(3): 341-357. [doi: 10.1177/1470357213483055]
Focuses on mobile phone footage of Gaddafi’s death in the context of Swedish television
news and its audiences. Addresses how the nature of ‘media witnessing’ is being
transformed through the employment of user-generated footage. While citizen video
encodes an extraordinary sense of presence and participation, it gains its credibility as a
document of scenes of suffering and violence as a moral cause through its distancing of the
spectator from the act being witnessed.

Andén-Papadopoulos, Kari. 2014. “Citizen Camera-Witnessing: Embodied political dissent in the


age of ‘mediated mass self-communication’.” New Media and Society 16(5): 753-769. [doi:
10.1177/1461444813489863]
Examines the ways in which user-generated images require us to rethink what it is to bear
witness to brutality in the age of fundamentally camera-mediated mass self-publication.
Argues that the camera-phone permits entirely new performative rituals of bearing witness,
such as dissenting bodies en masse recording their own repression and, via wireless global
communication networks, effectively mobilizing this footage as graphic testimony in a bid to
produce feelings of political solidarity.

Andén-Papadopoulos, Kari, and Mervi Pantti. Eds. 2011. Amateur Images and Global News.
Bristol: Intellect.
Unique collection of international and historical case studies that focuses on first-hand visual
recordings instead of verbal accounts of events by non-professionals. Argues the ways in
which the varied form and use of amateur images of events by news organizations highlights
problems of authentication and professionalization.

Andén-Papadopoulos, Kari, and Mervi Pantti. 2013. “Re-imagining Crisis Reporting: Professional
ideology of journalists and citizen eyewitness images.” Journalism 14(7): 960-977. [doi:
10.1177/1464884913479055]
Based on interviews with journalists representing major news organizations in Finland and
Sweden. Citizen-created photographs and videos have become a routine feature of
mainstream news coverage and a potential force of change that transforms professional
imaginaries of journalism that addresses crisis events.

Hänska-Ahy, Maximillian T., and Roxanna Shapour. 2013. “Who’s reporting the protests?
Converging practices of citizen journalists and two BBC World Service newsrooms, from Iran's

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election protests to the Arab uprisings.” Journalism Studies 14(1): 29-45. [doi:
10.1080/1461670X.2012.657908]
Examines traditional news media’s use of user-generated materials regarding social protests
during the Iran election of 2009 and the Arab Spring of 2011. Finds that the BBC’s Persian
and Arabic news services used such materials heavily in their own news coverage.
Concludes that user content was more likely to be used in traditional news programs the
more it exemplified traditional news techniques and forms.

Robinson, Sue. 2009. “‘If You had been With Us’: Mainstream Press and Citizen Journalists
Jockey for Authority over the Collective Memory of Hurricane Katrina.” New Media & Society 11:
795-814. [doi: 10.1177/1461444809105353].
In the case of coverage of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, citizen journalists’ accounts
became the authoritative ones due to their reliance on personal experience, which
professional journalists then relied upon.

Verclas, Katrin, and Patricia Mechael. 2008. *A Mobile Voice: The use of mobile phones in citizen
media[http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNADN040.pdf]*. Washington, D.C.: United States Agency
for International Development.
Lengthy descriptive report on citizen journalists’ use of mobile phones. The lack of technical
standards has created a fragmented technology, which is the primary hurdle to overcome
before widely social uses can emerge. Nevertheless, the report views such uses as
disruptive and challenging to traditional news organizations. Recommends development of
partnerships with NGOs and philanthropies to boost the pace of development.

Industry Structure
Studies of industry structure address the viability of existing ways that news industries support
themselves. Lacy et al. 2010 examines market competition. Compton and Benedetti 2010
address the impact of increased citizen journalism on levels of newsroom staffing, while Franklin
and Carlson 2011, and McNair 2013 examine its impact on the credibility of traditional news
organizations. Picard 2014 focuses more broadly on the evolution of new varieties of industry
relationships.

Compton, James R., and Paul Benedetti. 2010. “Labour, New Media and the Institutional
Restructuring of Journalism.” Journalism Studies 11(4): 487-499. [doi:
10.1080/14616701003638350].
Addresses the steady downsizing of news staffs around the world. Accelerating pace of
news production combined with narrowing profit margins has lead in great part to these
changes. Concludes that citizen journalism has not and will not fill the gap left by nor
compensate for shrinking professional news staffs.

Franklin, Bob and Matt Carlson. Eds. 2011. Journalists, Sources and Credibility: New
perspectives. New York: Routledge.
Collection that focuses on the role of sources in newswork as well as textually establishing
credibility, and how such issues are reconfigured by citizen journalism. Concludes that
members of the public continue to be regarded as less-credible sources, and that clear limits
continue to be placed on public participation in traditional news organizations.

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Lacy, Stephen, Margaret Duffy, Daniel Riffe, Esther Thorson, and Ken Fleming. 2010. “Citizen
Journalism Web Sites Complement Newspapers.” Newspaper Research Journal 31(2): 34-46.
Content analysis of scores of citizen blog sites, citizen journalism sites and newspaper sites
in the US. Concludes that citizen journalism sites complement rather than replace existing
professional news sites by providing hyperlocal content and more varieties of opinion.

McNair, Brian. 2013. “Trust, Truth and Objectivity: Sustaining Quality Journalism in the Era of the
Content-Generating User.” In Rethinking Journalism Trust and Participation in a Transformed
News Landscape. Edited by Chris Peters and Marcel Broersma, 75-88. New York: Routledge.
Turns the tables on arguments that equate quality journalism with the perpetuation of its
professionalization. It places responsibility for quality journalism on audiences and their
capacity for critical thinking rather than on restricting journalism to a professional elite.

Picard, Robert G. 2014. “Twilight or New Dawn of Journalism?” Journalism Studies 15(5): 500-
510. [DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2014.895530]
Synoptic, interpretive essay by prominent media economist. Argues that the key effect of the
economic changes undergone by news media has been on routines of production of news.
An industrial mode of production is steadily being eroded, to be replaced by a service mode
that emphasizes media companies as cross-platform distributors and curators of others’
content, and a craft mode in which news is produced by individual entrepreneurs and small-
scale cooperatives that provide content directly to readers.

Work Routines
The study of work routines addresses the intentions informing professional journalists’ use of
citizen journalism, which in turn determines organizational structure, an argument about their
interaction that is most clearly made in Paulussen and Ugille 2008. Where Singer et al. 2011 is
the broadest international study of how professional journalism uses citizen journalism by
partitioning it from the rest of the newsroom, Williams, Wardle, and Wahl-Jorgensen 2011 is a
valuable corresponding study based in what is typically regarded as the world’s pre-eminent news
organization of the BBC. One group of studies places most emphasis on the ideology of
professionalism as an explanatory factor. Examples include Cook and Dickinson 2013, which
suggests that citizen journalism is seen as inferior to professional news due to not abiding by
conventional news style. A second group highlights how workplace practices render citizen
journalism palatable for professional use. Hermida and Thurman 2008 discuss how citizen
journalism contributions are subjected to professional editing in order to be used. Reich 2008
notes the even less subjective factors of amount of time available for reporting and availability of
sources as key routinized conditions that explain the differences between professional and citizen
journalism. Thurman 2008 similarly emphasizes the difficulty with which citizen journalism meets
legal publishing requirements as a key reason for its slow pick-up in professional newsrooms.

Cook, Clare and Andrew Dickinson. 2013. “UK Social Media, Citizen Journalism and Alternative
News.” In The Future of Quality News Journalism: a cross-continental analysis. Edited by Peter J.
Anderson, George Ogola, and Michael Williams, 202-223. New York: Routledge.
Incisively analyzes the key sticking point between professional and citizen journalism, which
is contrasting ideas about what news quality is and how to achieve it.

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Hermida, A., and N. Thurman. 2008. “A Clash of Cultures: The integration of user-generated
content within professional journalistic frameworks at British newspaper websites.” Journalism
Practice 2(3): 343-356. [doi: 10.1080/17512780802054538].
Examines how and to what degree national UK newspapers are incorporating user-
generated content. While there has been a dramatic increase in the opportunities for user
content to appear in newspapers, a corresponding trend is toward increased use of
moderation as a gatekeeping role to shape user contributions.

Paulussen, Steve, and Pieter Ugille. 2008. “*User Generated Content in the Newsroom:
Professional and Organisational Constraints on Participatory
Journalism[https://www.westminster.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/20021/003WPCC-Vol5-
No2-Paulussen_Ugille.pdf]*.” Westminster Papers in Communication & Culture 5(2): 24-41.
Examines both the increasing spread of citizen journalism as well as ways in which this
spread is hindered by resistance from traditional news organizations. Emphasizes as a key
factor for this slow diffusion organizational barriers such as newsroom structures, work
routines and professional beliefs.

Reich, Zvi. 2008. “How Citizens Create News Stories.” Journalism Studies 9: 739-758. [doi:
10.1080/14616700802207748].
Locates a key reason for differences in citizen journalism and traditional journalism in
material circumstances. Concludes that citizen journalists use different routines than
professional journalists due to much more limited time and more limited access to sources.

Singer, Jane B., Alfred Hermida, David Domingo, Ari Heinonen, Steve Paulussen, Thorsten
Quandt, Zvi Reich, and Marina Vujnovic. 2011. Participatory Journalism: guarding open gates at
online newspapers. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Draws upon 67 in-depth interviews of personnel at prominent national news organizations in
10 western democracies. Focuses on how to what degree newsrooms are adjusting to
having non-professionals participate in producing and distributing news, either outside of or
as part of established news organizations. Concludes that news organizations in general
place clear limits on the extent to which the public might co-create news.

Thurman, Neil. 2008. “Forums for Citizen Journalists? Adoption of user generated content
initiatives by online news media.” New Media & Society 10: 139-157. [doi:
10.1177/1461444807085325].
Examines reasons for sluggish adoption of citizen journalism by traditional news
organizations. Highlights the importance of organizational factors for explaining the slow rate
of adoption, such as the difficulty with which citizen journalism meets professional legal and
commercial obligations.

Williams, Andrew, Claire Wardle, and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen. 2011. “Have They Got News for
Us?,” Journalism Practice 5: 85-99. [doi: 10.1080/17512781003670031].
In-depth observation and interviews of employees at the BBC. Concludes that user-
generated content does not challenge or upset existing journalistic routines. It is easily

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incorporated as a source for professionals to weigh and consider in the normal course of
editing and reporting.

Ethics
Closely aligned with issues of credibility are issues of ethics in the form of trust between readers
and journalists and the professional responsibility of fulfilling this charge. One body of studies
such as Singer and Ashman 2009, and Roberts and Steiner 2012 focus more narrowly on the
ethical reasoning of journalism professionals in relation to citizen journalism. A second body of
studies such as Babcock 2012 and Ess 2014 focuses more broadly on a variety of media used for
citizen journalism.

Babcock, William A. Ed. 2012. Media Accountability: Who will watch the watchdog in the Twitter
age? London: Routledge.
Traditional ethical responsibilities between well-established realms of audience and
professional, news and entertainment, and between comment, fact, and criticism are
becoming outmoded by the emerging digital environment. While calls for their preservation
ignore the changes that have happened, new ethical guidelines are sorely needed to reform
the traditional place of journalism in a democratic society.

Ess, Charles. 2014. Digital Media Ethics. 2nd ed. Malden: Polity.
Chap. 4 discusses citizen journalism directly. Argues for the need to retain the ethical
responsibilities for journalism in terms of fostering public debate and discussion, itself
deriving from liberal press theory. Concludes that the task for citizen journalism is to figure
out how to meet these ethical responsibilities.

Roberts, Jessica, and Linda Steiner. 2012. “Ethics of Citizen Journalism Sites.” In Digital Ethics:
research and practice, Heider, Don and Adrienne L. Massanari, Eds., pp. 80-98. New York: Peter
Lang.
Survey of 34 citizen-journalism sites and to what degree they made clear the ethical
responsibilities of users of these sites. Found that few if any took ethics seriously, whether
traditional news organizations or sites maintained by individual citizens. Unwanted behavior
is emphasized rather than affirmative responsibilities. Few linked to materials for further
reading.

Singer, Jane B., and Ian Ashman. 2009. “‘Comment is Free, but Facts are Sacred’: User-
generated content and ethical constructs at The Guardian.” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 24: 3-
21. [doi: 10.1080/08900520802644345].
Concludes that editors oppose citizen journalism in any form other than reader feedback and
opinion in order to uphold standards of journalistic professionalism.

Politics And Participation


Because of the fundamental role of journalism in democratic society as suggested by liberal press
theory, much scholarship addresses what effect if any citizen journalism has on political
participation. Such work is comparative, if only implicitly, in order to judge whether citizen
journalism improves upon or less effective than traditional journalism. Scholarship takes a
number of positions defined by the answer to this question. Fenton 2010, and Ratto and Boler

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2014 seek to establish key changes while acknowledging the openness and complexity of the
situation. Work such as Bakker and Paterson 2011, El-Nawawy and Khamis 2013, Papacharissi
2009, and Romano 2010 concludes that citizen journalism has an overall positive role to play,
although perhaps requiring additional development and refinement. On the other hand, work such
as Kaufhold, Valenzuela, and de Zúñiga 2010, and Williams and Carpini 2011 conclude that
traditional journalism at least holds its own, and that citizen journalism would do well to emulate
more fully some of its qualities. Tunney and Monaghan 2010 valuably treats citizen journalism in
relation to citizenship, suggesting that only in this relationship can the efficacy of citizen
journalism be adequately assessed.

Bakker, Tom, and Chris Paterson. 2011. “The New Frontiers of Journalism: Citizen participation
in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.” In Political Communication in Postmodern
Democracy: Challenging the primacy of politics, Brants, Kees and Katrin Voltmer, Eds., pp. 183-
199. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Addresses the extent to which citizen journalism is emerging in the British and Dutch online
mediascapes. Develops a typology contrasting participatory journalism, in which
professional news organizations exert a high degree of editorial control, with citizen
journalism, in which the extent of professional control is lower if non-existent. Concludes that
while participatory journalism is gaining a foothold (although grudgingly), many fewer
examples of citizen journalism exist, compared with the U.S.

El-Nawawy, Mohammed and Sahar Khamis. 2013. Egyptian Revolution 2.0: political blogging,
civic engagement, and citizen journalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Discusses the institutional locations and uses of social media in relation to the Arab Spring,
arguing that a variety of digital media have been crucial in allowing the public to assert its
views outside of official channels, or as sources to inform or be used as part of traditional
media accounts. The book focuses on an analysis of five blogs active at the time of the Arab
Spring, which together carried out many roles, from informing to mobilizing.

Fenton, Natalie. Ed. 2010. New Media, Old News: Journalism and democracy in the digital age.
Los Angeles: Sage.
Scholarly collection consisting of a mix of empirical studies and normative evaluation.
Notable for using wide-ranging approaches, from historical and economic to regulatory,
socio-political, and organizational. Explores in what ways the rise of citizen journalism has
reconfigured the role and place of journalism in a democratic society. Concludes that
common elements voiced by optimists and pessimists include accelerated pace and
increased space for news; multiplicity and polyvocality of perspectives; interactivity and
participation.

Kaufhold, Kelly, Sebastian Valenzuela, and Homero Gil de Zúñiga. 2010. “Citizen Journalism and
Democracy: How User-Generated News Use Relates to Political Knowledge and Participation.”
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 87: 515-529. [doi:10.1177/107769901008700305].
Found that citizen journalism boosted online participation, but that professional news
improved knowledge of events as well as civic participation generally.

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Papacharissi, Zizi. Ed. 2009. Journalism and Citizenship: New agendas in communication. New
York: Routledge.
Examines the intersection of journalism and citizenship within changes wrought by online
digital technologies and converged media environments. One of very few works that
examines a broad range of social media in relation to journalism. Argues that traditional
journalism should support non-traditional public participation in order to live up to its ethical
commitment to make possible broad public deliberation.

Ratto, Matt, and Megan Boler. Eds. 2014. DIY Citizenship: Critical making and social media.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Collection that addresses multiple forms of do-it-yourself citizenship through social media.
Section 4, titled “DIY and Media: Redistributing Authority and Sources in News Media” (pp.
307-401) contains a number of articles that address news explicitly. They see its collective
making as a means to develop and rehearse new forms of active citizenship, but at the
same time often limited by the very digital technologies that are portrayed as liberatory.

Romano, Angela, ed. 2010. International Journalism and Democracy: Civic engagement models
from around the world. New York: Routledge.
Distinguishes deliberation as a third possible journalistic role beyond the traditional role of
informing and the activist role of mobilizing, one that encourages community engagement
while retaining professional autonomy. Broadly international collection of case studies that
highlight efforts in putting this deliberative role in practice, the success of which is
determined by the quality of collaboration between journalism and other groups,
organizations, and institutions.

Tunney, Sean and Garrett Monaghan, eds. 2010. Web Journalism: a new form of citizenship?
Portland: Sussex Academic Press.
Geographically and thematically wide-ranging collection by scholars and practitioners.
Excellent introductory essay. Among the issues addressed is how news bloggers have
undermined traditional journalists’ authority, how blogging by journalists has affected their
own work, how these tensions play out in a variety of countries, and how web journalism as
a whole challenges if not remakes the traditional role of citizen in relation to news production
and dissemination.

Williams, Bruce A. and Michael X. Delli Carpini. 2011. After Broadcast News: Media regimes,
democracy, and the new information environment. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Centralized news organizations have stifled public involvement in politics, but the new media
environment suggests new potentials and means of involvement. Concludes by re-
emphasizing the need for forms of consensual, moderated public deliberation and debate.

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