ABSTRACT
Citizen journalism scholarship has strived to define what citizen journalism means, who citizen journalists are, and what contributions citizen journalism and citizen journalists alike make to community, democracy, and civil society at large. Despite the complexity and multiplicity of citizen journalism and its practices across diverse communities, countries, and cultures, this chapter attempts to offer a conceptual and theoretical framework for citizen journalism scholarship to continue to grow and develop toward an accumulated and constructed knowledge base. It provides the complexity and multiplicity of defining citizen journalism and citizen journalists alike in the contexts of other forms of journalism. Situating citizen journalism in the contexts of the public sphere and the theory of communicative action offers a useful framework to build a civic communication ecology where multiple public spheres, mainstream and alternative or counter-public spheres, are interconnected and interwoven with each other and are embedded in the networked digital media environment.
