Citizen journalism

Citizen journalism, also known as collaborative media, participatory journalism, democratic journalism, guerrilla journalism, 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". 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. 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. 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".
According to Flew, there have been three elements critical to the rise of citizen journalism: open publishing, collaborative editing, and distributed content. 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?, J. D. Lasica classifies media for citizen journalism into the following types:

Audience participation
Independent news and information Websites
Full-fledged participatory news sites
Collaborative and contributory media sites
Other kinds of "thin media"
Personal broadcasting sites
Open source news platforms

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, Courtney C. Radsch, and Clemencia Rodríguez. 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."

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". 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" 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

The idea that every citizen can engage in acts of journalism has a long history in the United States. "As early as the 1920s, journalist and political commentator Walter Lippman and American philosopher John Dewey debated the role of journalism in democracy, including the extent that the public should participate in the news-gathering and production processes." According to research conducted by Blaagaard, citizen journalism in St. Croix, between 1915 and 1925, provided a platform for colonized communities. Helping them express their perspectives and address certain social injustices that were overlooked at the time by colonial authorities. Local publications, for example The Herald, became a pathway for unheard voices to challenge dominant narratives. The contemporary citizen journalist movement emerged after journalists began to question the predictability of their coverage of events such as the 1988 U.S. presidential election. Those journalists became part of the public, or civic, journalism movement, which sought to counter the erosion of trust in the news media and the widespread disillusionment with politics and civic affairs.
Initially, discussions of public journalism focused on promoting journalism that was "for the people" by changing the way professional reporters did their work. According to Leonard Witt, however, early public journalism efforts were "often part of 'special projects' that were expensive, time-consuming, and episodic. Too often these projects dealt with an issue and moved on. Professional journalists were driving the discussion. They would have the goal of doing a story on welfare-to-work, and then they would recruit a cross-section of citizens and chronicle their points of view. Since not all reporters and editors bought into this form of public journalism, and some outright opposed it, reaching out to the people from the newsroom was never an easy task." By 2003, in fact, the movement seemed to be petering out, with the Pew Center for Civic Journalism closing its doors.
Traditionally, the term "citizen journalism" has had a history of struggle with deliberating on a concise and mutually agreed upon definition. Even today, the term lacks a clear form of conceptualization. Although the term lacks conceptualization, alternative names of the term are unable to comprehensively capture the phenomenon. For example, one of the interchangeable names with "citizen journalism" is "user-generated content". However, the issue with this alternative term is that it eliminates the potential civic virtues of citizen journalism and considers it to be stunted and proprietorial.
With today's technology the citizen journalist movement has found new life as the average person can capture news and distribute it globally. As Yochai Benkler has noted, "the capacity to make meaning to encode and decode humanly meaningful statements and the capacity to communicate one's meaning around the world, are held by, or readily available to, at least many hundreds of millions of users around the globe." Professor Mary-Rose Papandrea, a constitutional law professor at UNC School of Law, notes in her article, "Citizen Journalism and the Reporter's Privilege", that:
A 2004 trend of citizen journalism has been the emergence of what blogger Jeff Jarvis terms hyperlocal journalism, as online news sites invite contributions from local residents of their subscription areas, who often report on topics that conventional newspapers tend to ignore. "We are the traditional journalism model turned upside down," explains Mary Lou Fulton, the publisher of the Northwest Voice in Bakersfield, California. "Instead of being the gatekeeper, telling people that what's important to them 'isn't news,' we're just opening up the gates and letting people come on in. We are a better community newspaper for having thousands of readers who serve as the eyes and ears for the Voice, rather than having everything filtered through the views of a small group of reporters and editors."