Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives

Reese and Dai, in Chapter 18, explore the role of citizen journalists acting as media critics-both against domestic and international media- arguing that the Chinese blogosphere is increasingly featuring posts and comments that in their view are a form of public deliberation. Nationalism, they argue, suits the interests of the Chinese government, which has given citizens free range in criticizing the Western media-attacking CNN for discrepancies in its coverage of the Tibet riots and negative framing of the Olympic Torch relay, for instance. Conversely, they demonstrate how citizen reporters also critique domestic professional journalistic principles, forcing action on issues that would otherwise have been ignored. In the context of globalization, they contend, these developments point to new ways of understanding social change.

Authors: Stephen D. Reese and Jia Dai

In Chapter 7, Nip assesses citizen journalism’s response to the Wenchuan earthquake in southwestern China in May 2008. She reveals how citizen journalists were the first to report the earthquake both to a Chinese and international audience, providing eyewitness reports and expressions of personal emotion – grief, anger, and sympathy. Moreover, in a rare moment of openness under the Communist government, citizen journalists were also able to investigate and critique officials’ handling of the disaster. Such reporting did not completely evade
state censorship, however, and Nip further discusses new government tactics such as infiltration of citizen-generated content – that is, paying for people to post content supporting the government as a strategy to subvert opposition and manage this new form of public discourse.

Author: Joyce Nip

The idea that citizen journalism can help victims of crisis is also the focus of Vis’s (Chapter 4) assessment of the performance of Wikinews in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which struck the US coast in 2005. She illustrates how collaborative citizen journalism acted as a clearinghouse for disaster relief information, including messages from individuals willing to help the homeless. Moreover, Vis demonstrates how the Wikinews community, in striving to report on the crisis and its aftermath, dealt with issues such as the perceived “bias” of certain eyewitness reports submitted by ordinary citizens. The site’s Neutral Point of View policy, she argues, was sorely tested, especially in relation to the first-person reporting of lawlessness during the relief effort.

Author: Farida Vis

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

In Chapter 1, Allan sets the scene for the book’s discussion by exploring what counts as “citizen journalism” from varied historical perspectives. Beginning with a brief overview of the emergence of the internet as a “new news medium,” he proceeds to examine several crises where the reporting of ordinary citizens made a vitally important contribution. Examples include natural disasters (such as earthquakes and hurricanes), political scandal, and the tragedies of terrorism, conflict, and war, among others. Allan’s aim is to discern the emergent ecology of citizen journalism as it has been negotiated through the exigencies of crisis reporting.

Author: Stuart Allan