Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives

Children and young adults are often sidelined in debates surrounding citizenship and journalism. In thinking of children as citizens “in the making,” Guedes Bailey (Chapter 10) explores the importance of “Newspaper Clubs” in Brazil, a project conceived and implemented by the Brazilian NGO “Communication and Culture” in partnership with public schools (local and state government). Since 1995, newspaper clubs have empowered children by giving them a voice as reporters of community affairs, thereby socializing them as informed and active citizens. Guedes Bailey’s chapter also highlights the continued significance of print-based publications in the developing world, where many people-in particular children and young adults-have “no access to computers and have little or no information about, or practice with, communications technologies skills.”

Author: Olga Guedes Bailey

Khiabany and Sreberny (Chapter 9) address questions of citizenship and journalistic professionalism in an authoritarian regime by exploring the re-inflection of a more Western conceptualization of citizen journalism in relation to Iran’s radically different political setting. The Persian blogosphere, they demonstrate, provides a space for trade unions, radical student groups, and women’s movements to voice their plight, which is otherwise ignored by the traditional, state-controlled mass media. They show how citizenship and journalism are both experiencing a revival through innovative and alternative forms of expression in response to the political context.

Authors: Gholam Khiabany and Annabelle Sreberny

Citizen journalism from within a conflict zone is the focus of Zayyan and Carter’s (Chapter 6) discussion, which explores how bloggers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories “have helped to tell a truth different from the one frequently related in the mainstream media in many countries.” Many of these citizen journalists choose to write in English instead of Arabic so as to reach a global audience with their message and to plea for basic human rights. Zayyan and Carter argue that in so doing, “Palestinian citizen journalism is shifting the terms of debate on the conflict in the Middle-East.” This reporting embodies a “simple hope,” namely that by raising awareness of their suffering, “pressure will be brought to bear on politicians around the world to help end it.”

Authors: Heba Zayyan and Cynthia Carter

Empowerment is a crucial tenet of citizen journalism in India, a democracy with over one billion people. Sonwalkar (Chapter 5) argues that this new form of reporting is having an increasingly influential political function in highlighting social problems, such as the impact of severe poverty on those at the margins of public life. In a society where women, for example, “are seen as inferior and, in many cases, subjected to domestic violence,” blogging has enabled pressure groups to spark public discussion and debate “in a way that the mainstream news media have never done.” Citizen journalism, Sonwalkar points out, is being increasingly recognized as a powerful force in this regard.

Author: Prasun Sonwalkar