ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a definition of social journalism that situates it as an adjunct to the work of professional journalists. One key focus of newsroom innovation is the attempt to harness the power of social media to both enhance the news product and to grow a paying audience through subscriptions, or even donations. The chapter explores the history and future of this hybrid model that is often associated with attempts by news organizations to build audiences in their immediate communities, an approach that is often labelled the “hyper-local” model. It discusses side-by-side because many of the early crowdsourcing projects in journalism were heavily reliant on data and resulted in some of the first important data journalism stories of the early twenty-first century. As Nikki Usher has pointed out, there is an imbalance between the institutional forces of the News Establishment and the still relatively weak field of user-generated news-like content, including social journalism.
