Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives

The introduction highlights a number of pressing issues in relation to citizen journalism, exemplified by case studies from the US, Britain, Malaysia, and Liberia. Taken together, they are indicative of a communication continuum that stretches from global news organizations, such as CNN and the BBC, to the lone voices of individuals struggling to be heard against dauntingly formidable odds. Celebratory proclamations about the “global village” engendered by Web 2.0 ring hollow when we are reminded, in turn, that the majority of the world’s population has never made a telephone call, let alone logged on to a computer.

Accordingly, Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives will endeavor to delve beneath the rhetoric of globalization in seeking to examine the spontaneous actions of ordinary people—more often than not in the wrong place at the wrong time—compelled to adopt the role of reporter. In so doing, it strives to engage with several of the most significant topics for this important area of inquiry from fresh, challenging perspectives. Its aim is not to set down the terms of debate, but rather to encourage new forms of dialogue.

Authors: Stuart Allan and Einar Thorsen

The 2008 US presidential election marked a historic shift in American politics through the election of Barack Obama. One of the key characteristics of this campaign was the coming of age of the Internet, which is explored by Fiedler in Chapter 17. His discussion begins with the occasion on which Obama encountered Mayhill Fowler, a citizen journalist, at a campaign fundraising event that was off-limits to the mainstream press. Obama’s off-the-cuff remarks about the reasons why some working-class voters might feel embittered about politics, dutifully relayed by Fowler in a blog, sparked news headlines around the world. This was a crisis of an unusual sort for the Obama campaign to address, one that helped to reveal the changing nature of election campaigns in the age of the Internet.

Author: Tom Fiedler

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

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

The Iraq war provides the backdrop for Wall’s (Chapter 2) analysis of the recent wave of warblogs- “a feisty new genre of blog that focused specifically on the terrorism wars”-written by Iraqis from within the war zone, and milblogs, written by current or former soldiers. Of particular interest is the way in which institutional forces have sought to censor and intimidate bloggers and even to use their “grassroots authenticity as a cover for sophisticated war information operations.” Despite this, she argues, citizen journalism is poised to have a central position in the future “as amateurs play an even larger role in providing audiences with first-hand information about the world.”

Author: Melissa Wall