Citizen Journalism: a primer

This paper discusses the factors underpinning the emergence of citizen journalism,including the rise of Web 2.0, rethinking journalism as a professional ideology, thedecline of 'high modernist' journalism, divergence between elite and popular opinion,changing revenue bases for news production, and the decline of deference in democraticsocieties. It will connect these issues to wider debates about the implications ofjournalism and news production increasingly going into the Internet environment.

When news takes to the Internet

By Terry Flew, Associate Professor, Media and Communications,

Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

What is Citizen Journalism?

Citizen joumalism can in one sense be definedby some of its more conspicuous examples. TheKorean OhMyNews site (http://english.ohmynews.com/), which was established in 2000, has as itsslogan "every citizen is a reporter", and accessesonly 20 per cent of the content for its online sitefrom its employed staff, with the balance comingfrom the estimated 50,000 South Koreans whopost news stories onto the site. The malaysiakini.com site (www.malaysiakini.com) was establishedin 1999 by two young journalists, Steven Gan andPremesh Chandran, who had become disaffectedwith the degree of state control over Malaysia'sprint and broadcast media, and saw an opportunityto 'use the Internet to provide free and fair news tothe Malaysian public and to set new standards injournalism as well as to support the development offreedom of speech, social justice and democracy inMalaysia' (Malaysiakini 2007; c.f. George 2006).

In the United States, bloggers are variouslycredited with the political demise of the SenateMajority leader Trent lott for remarks he madesupporting racial segregation, and with revealingthat a story run by CBS news anchor Dan Ratherclaiming that George W. Bush avoided the draftwas based on forged documents. In Britain, theBBC is promoting citizen journalism internationallythrough its NewsMaker initiative (www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/newsmaker/), while The Guardianpromotes user interaction through its Comment isFree pages (commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/index.html). In Australia sites such as Crikey (www.crikey.com.au), New Matilda (www.newmatilda.com.au)and On Line Opinion (www.onlineopinion.com.au)seek both to promote new stories and to generatealterative means of gathering and aggregating newsand opinion online.

Internationally, the Indymedia network (www.indymedia.org), founded in the U.S. in the contextof the 1999 'Battle of Seattle' protests against theinaugural meeting of the World Trade Organisation,

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is a global, activist-based network of print, satelliteTV, video and radio that is all user-generated, andhas over 150 independent media centres worldwide,across over 30 countries.

A new model?

Is there then a new model of citizen journalismemerging around these various new mediainitiatives? There are a number of influential voiceswho think so. Dan Gillmor, founder of the Centre forCitizen Media, argued in We the Media that whereasconventional 'Big Media ... treated the news asa lecture', the new models of citizen journalismenabled by Web 2.0 technologies will see anevolution towards 'journalism as a conversation orseminar', as:

The lines will blur betweenproducers and consumers, changing therole of both in ways we're only beginningto grasp now The communication networkitself will become a medium for everyone'svoice, not just the few who can afford tobuy multimillion-dollar printing presses,launch satellites or win the government'spermission to squat on the public's airwaves(Gillmor 2006: xxiv).

Bowman and Willis (2003) refer to the rise ofparticipatory journalism, which arises from 'the resultof many simultaneous, distributed conversationsthat either blossom or quickly atrophy in the Web'ssocial network' (Bowman and Willis 2003: 9). Theydefine participatory journalism as:

The act of a citizen, or groupof citizens, playing an active role in theprocess of collecting, reporting, analysingand disseminating news and information.The intent of this participation is to provideindependent, reliable, accurate, wide-rangingand relevant information that a democracyrequires' (Bowman and Willis 2003: 9).

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Couldry (2003) has explored the wider implicationsof the relationship between participatory media,alternative forms of journalism and questions ofmedia power. Arguing that media power is bestunderstood as a form of symbolic power, or thepower to construct and communicate dominantideas, Couldry finds the potential significance ofuser-generated media as lying in its capacity toaccumulate organisation and economic resourcesthat can be used to tell different stories, andgenerate alternative sources of influence.

The potential arises for new forms of mediaproduction and consumption associated with theInternet and user-generated content lies in itspotential to generate 'new hybrid forms of mediaconsumption-production ... [that] would challengeprecisely the entrenched division of labour(producers of stories versus consumers of stories)that is the essence of media power' (Couldry 2003:45).

Citizen Journalism and Digital Media

While it is important not to see citizen journalism assimply an outgrowth of the Internet and new media,three elements of digital media technologies arecritical to the rise of citizen journalism and citizenmedia. The first is open publishing. The develop-ment of an open publishing architecture by MathewArnison and others involved in the 'Active Sydney'group in 1999, and the adoption of such opensource models by the Independent Media Centres(Indymedia) that year, was a landmark developmentin enabling new forms of news production. Arnison(2003) drew parallels between open publishing andthe free software movement, arguing that the keyto open publishing, as with open source software,was that the process of production was open andtransparent.

Second, collaborative editing is vital to citizenjournalism. In his taxonomy of peer-to-peer (P2P)publishing, and the extent to which a site and anews practice can be deemed to be open andparticipatory, Bruns (2005) differentiates such siteson the basis of the scope for user participation atthe input stage (contributing stories), output stage(ability to edit or shape final content), responsestage (ability to comment on, extend, filter, or editalready published content), and the extent to whichspecific roles (editor, journalist, user, reader) arefixed in the production process.

This generates a continuum of openness acrossonline news sites, from mainstream online newssites where a division between the producers andusers of news remains even if there is scope tocomment on stories, through to 'gatekeeping lite'sites that promote user contributions and somecollaborative editing, through to the editor-assisted

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Citizen Journalism: a primer

open news model of Korea's OhMyNews and MediaChannel in the United States, and completely openand decentralised sites such as Indymedia.

A third factor promoting citizen journalism isdistributed content through RSS (Rich SiteSummary or Really Simple Syndication) feeds.The great virtue of RSS is that it can take the workout of accessing new and interesting information,as users can establish an ongoing link with thesites that generate content that is of interest tothem, and link to it on their own sites as they seefil. While RSS development has occurred at somedistance from the concerns of citizen journalismit greatly assists it by reducing the search costsassociated with accessing valuable information andinsight from trusted sources, as well as buildinguser communities, thereby transforming news andinformation distribution from a hierarchical, top-down model with high barriers to entry to a moredecentralised and networked model.

Deuze (2003) has proposed that the diversity offorms of Web-based journalism can be conceivedof as operating across two axes of control andconnectivity. One relates to content, and theextent to which online news content is primarily orexclusively sourced from the organisation's staff ofemployed journalists with published content subjectto established editorial protocols, as comparedto sites that source content widely an emphasisethe forms of network connectivity that arise from adiversity of sources participating in providing contentto the site.

The second relates to the cultures in which contentis generated, and the extent to which participatorycommunication is highly moderated, as comparedto sites where comment and participation is openand largely unmoderated. For Deuze, this generatedthe following differentiation between the onlinenews sites of mainstream news organisations suchas CNN, BBC and MSNBC, index and categorysites such as the Drudge Report or Crikey, meta-comment sites such as MediaChannel, and shareand discussion sites such as Slashdot.

For Deuze, this in turn raises the question of what itmeans to transfer news production and distributionto the online environment. He proposes a four-foldtypology of ways in which online news media isrelated to the content-connectivity access on theone hand, and journalistic culture is open or closedon the other:

1. Orienting online journalism, which islargely a repurposing of pre-existingmedia content;

2. Monitorial online journalism, whichinvolves news organisations usingtheir online sites to seek better user

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Citizen Journalism: a primer

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