ABSTRACT
Australian media academic Axel Bruns calls the shift as ‘gatekeeping’ to ‘gatewatching’, which he suggests might help avoid the ‘somewhat patronising stance of industrial journalism’. One of the most controversial themes in discussions of the Internet’s impact on news and journalism has been what we might call the ‘fragmentation’ thesis. Civic journalism was about reconnecting with the original roots of modern journalism—the close relationship between reporting and civic duty; in a sense, a return to the democratic foundations of what is generally termed the Fourth Estate model of journalism. Citizen journalism is used as a catch-all phrase, but should be more tightly defined and used alongside other terms such as ‘amateur’ and ‘accidental’ journalist, or even ‘user-generated’ news-like content. The rise of citizen journalism, embodied particularly in YouTube’s ‘Broadcast Yourself’ slogan, is itself now contributing to the conditions of crisis in which journalism continues to flounder.
