Citizen Journalism

Citizen journalism is a term used to refer to the contributions of individuals not employed by news organizations to the reporting, analysis, and dissemination of information of public interest. The term came into wide use in the early 2000s, when the prominence and frequency of contributions by ordinary people to news reporting garnered public attention and prompted academic inquiry.

While citizens—a term used here loosely to mean nonprofessionals, rather than people possessing a particular legal status relative to a nation-state—had long contributed to journalism both directly, through letters to the editor, as sources for reporters, and in other ways, and indirectly through the choices they made as media consumers, the spread of new technologies in the late 1990s and early 2000s enabled many more to contribute ...