Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives

Mainstream media are increasingly appropriating citizen journalism content-broadly encapsulated under the umbrella of “user-generated content” (UGC)-in part to avoid perceptually undermining traditional journalism’s occupational values. Singer and Ashman (Chapter 19) pick up on this tension from the perspective of “journalists at Britain’s Guardian newspaper and its internationally popular website,” exploring how journalism practice is changing as it is forced to accommodate content from-and interaction with-its audience. Journalists’ responses are positioned in relation to traditional occupational values of authenticity, autonomy, and accountability. While “user-generated content” and audience interaction are cautiously embraced, journalists remain wary of the challenges inherent in negotiating new relationships with citizen
contributors.

Authors: Jane B. Singer and Ian Ashman

Citizen journalism is frequently associated with political activists seeking to challenge society’s established institutions and power relations. In Chapter 14, Salter explores the position of Indymedia’s citizen journalists in relation to libel, security laws, and incitement, drawing on recent examples where both private and state actors have attempted to shut its operations down. Salter argues that citizen journalists cannot simply “claim the rights afforded to journalists,” since the “privilege is dependent upon adherence to the rules” of law. Such activist citizen journalism, it follows, “will always be at a disadvantage compared to mainstream journalism-politically, economically, culturally and legally,” which has important implications for democratic dissent.

Author: Lee Salter

While such tolerance is more often associated with Western democracies, Carpentier, De Brabander, and Cammaerts (Chapter 13) demonstrate in their analysis of the Belgian peace movement that citizen journalism is also here a means to enable alternative or activist voices to be heard. They argue that the “active presence of the Indymedia.be (volunteer) staff members” at peace marches and associated events “highlights the interweaving of citizen journalism and peace activism.” That is, activists both report and actively support the objectives of such activities. They suggest that citizen journalism needs “to be seen as an inseparable part of civil society,” since this form of participatory media enables citizens to “be active in one of many (micro-)spheres relevant to daily life, organize different forms of deliberation, and exert their rights to communicate.”

Authors: Nico Carpentier, Ludo De Brabander, and Bart Cammaerts

Rounding out this section, Thorsen (Chapter 8) explores how scientists researching the climate-change crisis in Antarctica are using blogging as a means to communicate directly with the public. He argues that citizen journalism can function as a form of educational outreach, giving us seemingly unmediated access to scientists who are recording the effects of climate change first-hand. This emergent form of science reporting is shown to provide an important contrast to traditional forms of journalism, where the process of climate change is a difficult fit for conventional, event-led news agendas.

Author: Einar Thorsen

Citizens’ eyewitness photography-especially where the use of a cell or mobile telephone equipped with a camera is concerned-is increasingly playing a significant role in crisis reporting. In Chapter 3, Liu, Palen, Sutton, Hughes, and Vieweg explore the genre of photo-blogging in relation to six distinct crises, several of which were of global significance. They single out for special attention the evolving role of Flickr, the prominent photo-sharing website, to show how it serves as a community forum for crisis-related photojournalism. Of particular interest, they point out, are efforts underway to develop a set of normative criteria to guide the nature of social practice around photographic content during emergency response and recovery efforts.

Authors: Sophia B. Liu, Leysia Palen, Jeannette Sutton, Amanda L. Hughes, and Sarah Vieweg