citizen journalism

citizen journalism, journalism that is conducted by people who are not professional journalists but who disseminate information using Web sites, blogs, and social media. Citizen journalism has expanded its worldwide influence despite continuing concerns over whether citizen journalists are as reliable as trained professionals. Citizens in disaster zones have provided instant text and visual reporting from the scene. People in countries affected by political upheaval and often in countries where print and broadcast media are controlled by the government have used a variety of technological tools to share information about hot spots. Swirling in the background of these developments was a debate over whether the term citizen journalism was itself accurate.

Both the term and the practice crystallized in South Korea, where the online entrepreneur Oh Yeon-ho declared in 2000 that “every citizen is a reporter.” Oh and three South Korean colleagues started an online daily newspaper in 2000 because, he said, they were dissatisfied with the traditional South Korean press. Unable to afford the costs of hiring professionals and printing a newspaper, they started OhmyNews, a Web site that used volunteers to generate its content. In a speech on the site’s seventh anniversary, Oh, the firm’s president and CEO, noted that the news site began with 727 citizen reporters in one country and by 2007 had grown to 50,000 contributors reporting from 100 countries.

Since then the Internet has spawned thousands of news sites and millions of bloggers. Traditional news media, while battling declining readership and viewership, leapt into the fray with their own Web sites and blogs by their own journalists, and many newspapers invited readers to contribute community news to their Web sites. Some groups started their own “hyperlocal” online news sites to cover happenings in their neighbourhoods or specialized topics of interest that were not reported by larger media organizations.

Among those who studied and nurtured citizen journalism, the phenomenon often went by other names. In a 2007 article, editor J.D. Lasica called it “participatory journalism,” though he described it as “a slippery creature. Everyone knows what audience participation means, but when does that translate into journalism?” Dan Gillmor, founder and director of the Center for Citizen Media and author of the book We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (2004), also rejected any single definition for the transformation in news that had begun in the late 1990s. He called this era “a time of incredible exploration” because of the democratization of access to inexpensive and ubiquitous publishing tools.

Citizen journalism has played a major role in 21st-century political events. The Web site Twitter established itself as an emerging outlet for the dissemination of information during the protests following the Iranian presidential election in June 2009. Although the protests did not result in a change in the election results or a new election, the tweets of de facto journalists showed the potential of nontraditional media to circumvent government censorship. In Egypt, activists protesting the government of President Ḥosnī Mubārak during the uprising of 2011 often organized themselves by forming groups on the social networking Web site Facebook.