Citizen Journalism

The notion of citizen journalism encompasses a wide range of practices and experiments running from opening traditional media to citizen participation in the news process, to locally based reporting for local or global networks, to citizen expression in the blogosphere (and more recently in the vlogosphere, or video blogosphere) that can be characterized as a networked structure of storytelling.

With roots in the civic journalism movement of the 1990s as well as earlier Deweyan inspired forms of community journalism, citizen journalism gained momentum from the explosion of Web-enabled forms of citizen expression. Partly a reaction to critiques of news coverage by traditional media, partly a process of individual expressive motivation, and partly exploration of new business models for news, different forms of citizen journalism are emerging worldwide. Therefore, rather than specific content, a particular business model, or the adoption of certain journalistic routines, what defines citizen journalism is a move toward openness of information; horizontal structures of news gathering and news telling; blurred lines [Page 106]between content production and use; and diffused accountability based more on reputation and meaning than on structural system hierarchies.

Due to its broad scope, the current prevalence of citizen journalism is hard to quantify. Yet, with most traditional media accepting some form or other of citizen participation in their content, and the explosion of citizen expression in the blogosphere (where millions of active Internet blogs are doubling every 6 months), the contribution of citizen journalism to the news environment is substantial, and the potential for its continued growth is high. Some prominent examples of the contribution of citizen journalism to the new news environment can be found in the leading discursive role of Ohmynews (http://www.ohmynews.com) in the 2003 presidential election in South Korea, the on-spot reporting of Hurricane Katrina, and alternative news source functions in the “Rathergate” case in 2005.

To characterize this vast scope of citizen journalism practices, multiple dimensions have to be considered. One dimension is the level of citizen participation in the news production process. On one side of this spectrum would be mainstream media institutions that systematically incorporate the views expressed by the readers in response to their articles in the forms of comments or other city issues in the form of citizen blogs. Along these lines, increased citizen participation would include the opening of the editorial process for citizen review as well as citizen contributions in reporting and editorial decision, as exemplified by the Spokane Spokesman Review (http://www.spokemanreview.com). On the other side of this spectrum are news media that rely fully on the citizen contributors for editorial decisions and contents production, such as Wikinews (http://www.wikinews.org) as well as most independent blogs.

In terms of content, citizen journalism projects alternate fact-oriented reporting of locally based participants in the context of a global network, as well as self-expression of opinion. For example, Ohmynews uses a collaboration model where a professional writing and editing staff of 60 people work together with over 43,000 citizen journalists that write news reports for their initial Korean version as well as for their two new International and Japanese versions. The other side of this content dimension would be exemplified by the millions of blogs that are devoted to opinion expression, rather than fact-oriented reporting.

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