Constructing Participatory Journalism as a Scholarly Object

Theorizing Citizenship in Citizen Journalism

“…Discussions of citizen journalism have, thus far, been heavily focused on theories and practices of journalism, leaving theories and practices of citizenship at best marginalized or elided even though citizen journalism debates often focus on the democratic implications of citizen journalism (Borger et al 2013). As this article has shown, new practices and practitioners generate significant challenges for locating and theorizing the dynamic and multi-faceted forms of citizenship at work within citizen journalism.…”

“…The literature on citizen journalism is heavily concentrated on the definitional boundaries of journalistic practice and what it means to be a journalist (see Borger et al 2013 for a review of such literature). Citizen journalism debates originated primarily around blogging (Lasica 2003;Gillmor 2004), and whilst blogs continue to dominate much citizen journalism output (Meadows 2013), textbased "j-blogs" are now just one part of a raft of online and mobile communication tools being used to produce and disseminate news content, including micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Sina Weibo, video sharing sites like You Tube, and social media networks like Facebook.…”

“…It could be argued that the academic focus on the relationship between citizen journalism and journalism is appropriate with the citizen part of the concept having emerged as merely one convenient label alongside other terms such as "participatory journalism" (Bowman and Willis 2003;Frölich et al 2012;Borger et al 2013). The problems with the uncritical adoption of the term, however, are that it potentially homogenizes the range of individuals engaged in new journalistic practices and the contexts in which they do so, as well as the underlying theories of what it means to be a "citizen" who engages in journalism.…”

“…Whilst it might be argued that citizen journalism is simply a convenient label for a range of new journalistic practices, there is a sometimes explicit but often implicit normative dimension to discussions of citizen journalism's contribution to democracy as a result of citizens participating in news production and news flows (Griffiths 2004;Goode 2009;McCauliff 2011;Borger et al 2013). Yet theories of citizenship in citizen journalism are at best considered at the margins of discussion (Coleman and Blumler 2009;Rosenberry and St. John III 2010;Tewkesbury and Rittenburg 2012) or often not considered at all (Bowman and Willis 2003;Gillmor 2004;Wall 2012).…”

The Material Traces of Journalism

“…As a result, media archeology scholars suggest that we explore the entanglement of past and present (Parikka 2012;Huhtamo 2011). Foucault's perspective was also directly applied to online journalism studies by Borger et al (2013) who have explored the genealogy of "participatory journalism" as a scholarly object and aimed at retracing its "discursive formation" in scholarly discourse about journalism. Foucault was also at the heart of the edited book Le journalisme en invention (Ringoot and Utard 2005) to explain the constant and historical invention of journalism through the dispersed discourses and the polyphonic nature of journalism as a social practice.…”