ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the public’s perceptions on citizen and professional journalism. It examines the levels of credibility ascribed to citizen and professional journalism in their respective news coverage. Media credibility research had initially focused on the various dimensions and modifications of source credibility, which examines the impact that various characteristics of communicators, such as an individual, a group, or an organization, can have on message processing. Changes in the media environment with various developments of networked communication technologies have further complicated the understanding of credibility. The credibility of citizen journalism stories has been an area of growing interest. For example, A. Miller and D. Kurpius conducted an experiment on television news source credibility and found participants rated official sources to be significantly higher in credibility although they rated both official and citizen sources as credible. Empirical investigations on the content of citizen visual submissions are also growing.
