Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The term → citizen journalism appears to have been first used in the US in the early 2000s, by → bloggers and media commentators (e.g. Rheingold 2002 ) to describe accounts and images of newsworthy events produced by individuals outside news organizations. The history of the term is therefore closely associated with the rise of the → Internet as a medium of → news and public information and of portable media technologies such as camera phones (→ Mobility, Technology for ). While citizens have participated in newsmaking from the beginnings of the newspaper in the seventeenth century, journalism's industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century and later its professionalization marginalized that involvement until the late 1990s (→ Journalism, History of ). The term is also associated with liberal pluralist ideals for journalism (→ Plurality ). Accounts that describe amateur journalism not on the Internet or that come from other perspectives sometimes prefer alternative terms, such as → community media , → radical media or → participatory communication . Many accounts of the rise of citizen journalism to prominence and influence are celebratory. These tend to divide into accounts of the way that citizen participation can rejuvenate the practice of journalism (e.g. Bowman & Willis 2003 ) and accounts, often grounded in cybercultural ideals of collective self-determination, ... log in or subscribe to read full text