ABSTRACT

YouTube is no doubt important and within 18 months of its launch the site was certainly attracting the attention of journalists and journalism scholars. On 20 May 2008, YouTube launched its Citizen Journalism channel. In April 2009, YouTube announced a deal with Universal Music to launch a new service to showcase global music artists on the label. Bruns’ theories of open source journalism are typical of one strand in this debate that privileges the values and processes of ‘gatewatching’ over the practices of the more organized and professional reportorial community that still operates within the bounds of the news industry. For Bruns crowdsourcing is the ‘hive mind’ of citizen journalism that enables ‘monitorial citizenship’ based on knowledge sharing and collaboration. The researchers suggest, quite usefully, that their analysis might also be applicable to online bulletin board sites, such as Slashdot, that have, in the past few years, begun to emerge as serious sites for community news circulation.