Citizen journalism, also known as collaborative media, participatory journalism, democratic journalism, guerrilla journalism,Case, J. A. "Recovering the Radical: Biocybernetic Subversion in Guerrilla Video Primer ." Paper presented at the NCA 93rd Annual Convention, Chicago, IL, November 14, 2007. grassroots journalism, or street journalism, is based upon members of the community playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information. Courtney C. Radsch defines citizen journalism "as an alternative and activist form of news gathering and reporting that functions outside mainstream media institutions, often as a response to shortcomings in the professional journalistic field, that uses similar journalistic practices but is driven by different objectives and ideals and relies on alternative sources of legitimacy than traditional or mainstream journalism".Radsch, Courtney C. The Revolutions will be Blogged: Cyberactivism and the 4th Estate in Egypt. Doctoral Dissertation, American University, 2013. Jay Rosen offers a simpler definition: "When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another." The underlying principle of citizen journalism is that ordinary people, not professional journalists, can be the main creators and distributors of news. Citizen journalism should not be confused with community journalism or civic journalism, both of which are practiced by professional journalists; collaborative journalism, which is the practice of professional and non-professional journalists working together; and social journalism, which denotes a digital publication with a hybrid of professional and non-professional journalism. According to Seungahn Nah and Deborah S. Chung in their book "Understanding Citizen Journalism as Civic Participation" citizen journalism is "highly embedded in local communities where community residents engage in day-to-day routines of community storytelling about local politics, public affairs, community events, neighborhood issues, schools, public transportation, land uses and environments, and much more."
Citizen journalism is a specific form of both citizen media and user-generated content (UGC). By juxtaposing the term "citizen", with its attendant qualities of civic-mindedness and social responsibility, with that of "journalism", which refers to a particular profession, Courtney C. Radsch argues that this term best describes this particular form of online and digital journalism conducted by amateurs because it underscores the link between the practice of journalism and its relation to the political and public sphere.
Citizen journalism was made more feasible by the development of various online internet platforms. New media technology, such as social networking and media-sharing websites, in addition to the increasing prevalence of cellular telephones, have made citizen journalism more accessible to people worldwide. Recent advances in new media have started to have a profound political impact.Gilardi, F. (2016). Digital Democracy. How Digital Democracy is Changing Democracy And Its Study., 1-5. Due to the availability of technology, citizens often can report breaking news more quickly than traditional media reporters. Notable examples of citizen journalism reporting from major world events are, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the 2013 protests in Turkey, the Euromaidan events in Ukraine, and Syrian Civil War, the 2014 Ferguson unrest, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.
Being that citizen journalism is yet to develop a conceptual framework and guiding principles, it can be heavily opinionated and subjective, making it more supplemental than primary in terms of forming public opinion. Critics of the phenomenon, including professional journalists and news organizations, claim that citizen journalism is unregulated, amateur, and haphazard in quality and coverage. Furthermore, citizen journalists, due to their lack of professional affiliation, are thought to lack resources as well as focus on how best to serve the public. A research team of citizen journalists created an OER library that contains video interviews to provide access to reliable sources.
Theory Citizen journalism, as a form of alternative media, presents a "radical challenge to the professionalized and institutionalized practices of the mainstream media".Atton, Chris. 2003. What is "alternative journalism"? Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 4, no. 3: 267-400.
According to Flew, there have been three elements critical to the rise of citizen journalism: open publishing, collaborative editing, and distributed content.Flew, Terry. 2005. New media: An introduction. South Melbourne, Vic.; New York: Oxford University Press. Mark Glaser said in 2006:.
…people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others.
In What is Participatory Journalism? (2003),Lasica, J. D. "What is Participatory Journalism?" 2003-08-07, Online Journalism Review, August 7, 2003. J. D. Lasica classifies media for citizen journalism into the following types:
Audience participation (such as user comments attached to news stories, personal blogs, photographs or video footage captured from personal mobile cameras, or local news written by residents of a community) Independent news and information Websites (Consumer Reports, the Drudge Report) Full-fledged participatory news sites (one:convo, NowPublic, OhmyNews, DigitalJournal.com, GroundReport, 'Fair Observer') Collaborative and contributory media sites (Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Newsvine) Other kinds of "thin media" (mailing lists, email newsletters) Personal broadcasting sites (video broadcast sites such as KenRadio) Open source news platforms (such as Veiwapp and Wikinews)
The literature of citizen, alternative, and participatory journalism is most often situated in a democratic context and theorized as a response to corporate news media dominated by an economic logic. Some scholars have sought to extend the study of citizen journalism beyond the developed Western world, including Sylvia Moretzsohn,Moretzsohn, S. 2006. " Citizen journalism" and the myth of redemptive technology. Brazilian Journalism Research 2, no. 2. Courtney C. Radsch,Radsch, C. (2011). Arab bloggers as citizen journalists (Transnational). In J. Downing (Ed.), Encyclopedia of social movement media. (pp. 62–65). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. and Clemencia Rodríguez.Rodríguez, Clemencia. 2001. Fissures in the mediascape : An international study of citizens' media. The Hampton Press Communication Series. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press. Radsch, for example, wrote that "Throughout the Arab world, citizen journalists have emerged as the vanguard of new social movements dedicated to promoting human rights and democratic values."Radsch, C. (2011). Arab bloggers as citizen journalists (Transnational). In J. Downing (Ed.), Encyclopedia of social movement media. (pp. 62–65). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. P. 61
Theories of citizenship According to Vincent Campbell, theories of citizenship can be categorized into two core groups: those that consider journalism for citizenship, and those that consider journalism as citizenship. The classical model of citizenship is the base of the two theories of citizenship. The classical model is rooted in the ideology of informed citizens and places emphasis on the role of journalists rather than on citizens.
The classical model has four main characteristics: journalists' role of informing citizens citizens are assumed to be informed if they regularly attend to the news they are supplied with more informed citizens are more likely to participate the more informed citizens participate, the more democratic a state is more likely to be.
The first characteristic upholds the theory that journalism is for citizens. One of the main issues with this is that there is a normative judgement surrounding the amount and nature of information that citizens should have as well as what the relationship between the two should be. One branch of journalism for citizens is the "monitorial citizen" (coined by Michael Schudson). The "monitorial citizen" suggests that citizens appropriately and strategically select what news and information they consume. The "monitorial citizen" along with other forms of this ideology conceive individuals as those who do things with information to enact change and citizenship. However, this production of information does not equal to an act of citizenship, but instead an act of journalism. Therefore, citizens and journalists are portrayed as distinctive roles whereas journalism is used by citizens for citizenship and conversely, journalists serve citizens.
The second theory considers journalism as citizenship. This theory focuses on the different aspects of citizen identity and activity and understands citizen journalism as directly constituting citizenship. The term "liquid citizenship" (coined by Zizi Papacharissi) depicts how the lifestyles that individuals engage in allow them to interact with other individuals and organizations, which thus remaps the conceptual periphery of civic, political, and social. This "liquid citizenship" allows the interactions and experiences that individuals face to become citizen journalism where they create their own forms of journalism. An alternative approach of journalism as citizenship rests between the distinction between "dutiful" citizens and "actualizing" citizens. "Dutiful" citizens engage in traditional citizenship practices, while "actualizing" citizens engage in non-traditional citizenship practices. This alternative approach suggests that "actualizing" citizens are less likely to use traditional media and more likely to use online and social media as sources of information, discussion, and participation. Thus, journalism in the form of online and social media practices become a form of citizenship for actualizing citizens.
Criticisms have been made against citizen journalism, especially from among professionals in the field. Citizen journalists are often portrayed as unreliable, biased and untrained as opposed to professionals who have "recognition, paid work, unionized labour and behaviour that is often politically neutral and unaffiliated, at least in the claim if not in the actuality".
History