User:Frmjenn/sandbox

To the Wiki article "citizen journalism" I will be considering adding: the history and origins of the term; citizen journalism today in the form of social media and bloggers; and the theories of citizenship - citizenship for journalism and citizenship as journalism.

Some of the references I will be considering include: Melissa Wall (2015) Citizen Journalism, Digital Journalism, 3:6, 797-813, DOI:10.1080/21670811.2014.1002513 Vincent Campbell (2015) Theorizing Citizenship in Citizen Journalism, Digital Journalism, 3:5, 704-719, DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2014.937150
 * "Citizen Journalism" by Melissa Wall from Digital Journalism
 * "Theorizing Citizenship in Citizen Journalism" by Vincent Campbell in Digital Journalism

Citizen Journalism's Lead
Quoted from "citizen journalism's" wiki page, citizen journalism is rooted in the notion of citizens playing "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information". The term "citizen journalism" has had an ambiguous history as scholars have been unable to decide on a mutually agreeable definition.

According to Vincent Campbell, there are two main theories of citizenship that can be categorized. These categories are titled those that consider journalism for citizenship and those that consider journalism as citizenship. The first category suggests that the purpose of journalism is to inform the public and citizens, hence being for citizens. The second category suggest that journalism is a form of citizenship where journalism allows individuals to enact a change and participate.

One of the more predominant forms of citizen journalism today exist in the form of social media and bloggers. Social media and blogging allows individuals to participate and express their thoughts and opinion creating a journalism that is created by the citizens for the citizens.

Citizen Journalism Draft
The term of citizen journalism has had a history of struggling with a concise and mutually agreed upon definition. Although the term may be lacking a clear form of conceptualization, the alternative names of the term are unable to comprehensively capture the phenomenon. For example, one of the interchangeable names with citizen journalism is “user-generated content” (UGC). However, this term eliminates the potential civic virtues of citizen journalism and considers it to be stunted and proprietorial.

According to Vincent Campbell, theories of citizenship can be categorized into two core groups: those that consider journalism for citizenship and those that consider journalism as citizenship. Before discussing the two broad theories, the classical model of citizenship must first be discussed. This classical model is rooted in the ideology of informed citizens and places emphasis of the role of journalists rather than citizens. The classical model has 4 main characteristics: journalists’ role of informing citizens; citizens are assumed to informed if they regularly attend to the news that they are supplied with; more informed citizens are more likely to participate; the more informed citizens participate, the more democratic a state is likely to be. The first characteristic that the role of journalism is to inform citizens upholds the theory that journalism is for citizens. One of the main issues with this first theory is that there is a normative judgement surrounding the amount and nature of information that citizen should have as well as what the relationship between the two should be. The “monitorial citizen” coined by Michael Schudson suggests that citizens appropriately and strategically select what they consume. The monitorial citizen along with other forms of this ideology conceive individuals as those who do things with information to enact citizenship. However, this production information does not equal to an act of citizenship but an act of journalism. Therefore, citizens and journalists are portrayed as distinctive roles whereas journalism is used by citizens for citizenship and conversely, journalist serve citizens.

The second theory considers journalism as citizenship. This theory focuses on the different aspects of citizen identity and activity and understands citizen journalism as directly constituting citizenship. The term “liquid citizenship” coined by Zizi Papcharissi depicts how as the lifestyles that individuals engage in allow them to interact with other individuals and organizations, which thus remaps the conceptual periphery of civic, political, and social. This liquid citizenship allows the interactions and experiences that individuals face to become citizen journalism where they create their own forms of journalism. An alternative approach rests between the distinction between “dutiful” citizens and “actualizing” citizens. Dutiful citizens engage in traditional citizenship practices, while actualizing citizens engage in non-traditional citizenship practices. This alternative approach suggests that actualizing citizens are less likely to use traditional media and more likely to use online and social media as sources of information, discussion, and participation. Thus, journalism in the form of online and social media practices become a form of citizenship for actualizing citizens.

Today, individually produced citizen journalism exists in the form of the social media platforms such as blogs, YouTube, and Twitter. These social media platforms encourage and facilitate engagement with other citizens who participate in creating content through commenting, liking, linking, and sharing. This practice is considered to be the 21st century version of individualized citizen journalism. The first wave of this type of citizen journalism came about in the form of amateur news bloggers. These bloggers often created content and narrative that challenged and critiqued the mainstream news outlets. The majority of the content produced by these amateur news bloggers were actually not original content, but curated information that was primarily monitored and edited by these various bloggers. However, recently there has been a decline in the amateur news blogger due to easy to run and maintain social media platforms. These social media platforms allows individuals to easily create and share content.