Social news, citizen journalism and democracy

This article aims to contribute to a critical research agenda for investigating the democratic implications of citizen journalism and social news. The article calls for a broad conception of ‘citizen journalism’ which is (1) not an exclusively online phenomenon, (2) not confined to explicitly ‘alternative’ news sources, and (3) includes ‘metajournalism’ as well as the practices of journalism itself. A case is made for seeing democratic implications not simply in the horizontal or ‘peer-to-peer’ public sphere of citizen journalism networks, but also in the possibility of a more ‘reflexive’ culture of news consumption through citizen participation. The article calls for a research agenda that investigates new forms of gatekeeping and agenda-setting power within social news and citizen journalism networks and, drawing on the example of three sites, highlights the importance of both formal and informal status differentials and of the software ‘code’ structuring these new modes of news production.

[1]  G. Walters.  Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Dan Schiller , 2000, Ethics and Information Technology.

[2]  Steven Johnson,et al.  Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate , 1997 .

[3]  Luke Goode.  Jurgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere , 2005 .

[4]  J. Bolter,et al.  Remediation: Understanding New Media , 1999 .

[5]  I. Iakovidis,et al.  The road ahead. , 2004, Studies in health technology and informatics.

[6]  Watching the Watchdog: Bloggers As the Fifth Estate , 2006 .

[7]  Pierre Lévy,et al.  Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace , 1997 .

[8]  F. Jameson,et al.  Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism , 1992 .

[9]  Dan Schiller,et al.  Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System , 1999 .

[10]  F. Guillory.  Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society , 2010 .

[11]  D. Porter.  Internet Culture , 1996 .

[12]  Axel Bruns,et al.  Gatewatching, Not Gatekeeping: Collaborative Online News , 2003 .

[13]  Vanessa Diemand.  Geert Lovink (2008): Zero Comments. Blogging and critical Internet culture. London: Routledge , 2009 .

[14]  M. Wall.  ‘Blogs of war’ , 2005 .

[15]  Jim Mac Laughlin,et al.  Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism B. Anderson , 1988 .

[16]  Aaron Barlow,et al.  The Rise of the Blogosphere , 2007 .

[17]  C. W. Morris.  Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism , 1995 .

[18]  L. Manovich,et al.  The language of new media , 2001 .

[19]  Dan Gillmor,et al.  We the media - grassroots journalism by the people, for the people , 2006 .

[20]  J. Habermas,et al.  The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiryinto a category of bourgeois society , 1991 .

[21]  Elisia L. Cohen,et al.  Online Journalism as Market-Driven Journalism , 2002 .

[22]  Oliver Boyd-Barrett,et al.  The Globalization of News , 1998 .

[23]  S. Moores.  Interpreting audiences: the ethnography of media consumption. , 1993 .

[24]  Howard Rheingold,et al.  The Virtual Community: Finding Commection in a Computerized World , 1993 .

[25]  James Curran,et al.  Power without responsibility: The press and broadcasting in Britain , 1991 .

[26]  G. Lovink.  Zero comments: blogging and critical internet culture , 2008 .

[27]  G. Lovink,et al.  Zero comments : Elemente einer kritischen Internetkultur , 2008 .

[28]  Donald Matheson,et al.  Weblogs and the Epistemology of the News: Some Trends in Online Journalism , 2004, New Media Soc..