ABSTRACT
In this era of the smartphone, coffee shop wifi and YouTube, the question of the twenty-first century may not be ‘Who is a journalist?’ but ‘Who isn’t?’ Citizen witnesses provided some of the most immediate visual coverage of the Sumatran tsunami of 2004 and the London subway bombings of 2007 (Gordon, 2007). Iran’s ‘green’ revolution of 2009 and the Egyptian Spring were also said to be fuelled by the sharing of information via social media (Ali and Fahmy, 2013). In one generation, television news has gone from an expensive skill speciality to an arena in which children can participate. Welcome to post-modernity’s Tower of Babel, where everyone can be a journalist, many commit journalistic acts, a few are paid and still others take pride in contributing to the public sphere as permanent, unpaid outsiders –alternative journalists, to use Atton’s (2009) term.
