ABSTRACT
Is citizen journalism – blogging, open-source newsgathering, wikis, informational “mash-ups” and citizen journalism sites – transforming the nature of news? Many observers believe so. Carr (2007) refers to open-source journalism as nothing short of a “revolution” in newsgathering. Lemann (2006) wonders if citizen journalists aren’t in the process of “stripping away” the possibility of professional journalism entirely. Bowman and Willis summarize the prevailing wisdom: the “profession of journalism finds itself at a rare moment in history when, for the first time, its hegemony as a gatekeeper of news is threatened by not just new technologies and competitors but, potentially, the audience it serves” (2003, p. 7). Drawing on an analysis of 21 citizen journalism sites accessed from November 1-7, 2007, this chapter assesses this conventional wisdom by placing the potential for a transformation of journalism in a historical context that includes public journalism. Citizen journalists describe their work in ways similar to traditional journalism, except for the significance they place on interactivity. The relation between interactivity and traditional norms has not been worked out by citizen journalists – at least as reflected by the evidence available from their sites – but the intellectual work of public journalism may be of some help in this regard. For this study, transformation is defined in terms of journalism’s avowed purposes. A focus on journalism’s aims rather than practice lends a historical dimension to assessments of citizen journalism. Historians (Kaplan, 2002; McGerr, 1986; Schudson, 1978, 1998) tell us that fundamental changes in the purpose of news are relatively rare. In a review of 300 years of news, Schudson (1998) detects only two such shifts: the move from a journalism of affiliation to a journalism of association in the 1830s, and the transition from a journalism of association to a journalism of information at the turn of the twentieth century. On these occasions, journalism was put to fundamentally new purposes, and justified by new goals.
