“Random acts of journalism?”: How citizen journalists tell the news in Sweden

Abstract

In this study, the results from a content analysis of four Swedish online citizen journalism outlets are presented and discussed. The analysis focuses on new digital venues for news-making in theory and the question of the political relevance of citizen journalism in reality. This broad question is operationalized by asking more specifically how citizen journalists tell the news, according to established distinctions between variations in topic dimensions, focus, and presentational style. Our results show that citizen journalists tend to tell soft news. They rarely report on policy issues, local authorities, or people affected by decisions being made by them. Furthermore, the news focuses on individual relevance and is mostly episodic in nature. The style of writing is predominantly impersonal and unemotional. In sum, our results suggest that citizen journalism in Sweden is not yet at a stage where it can be considered a plausible alternative to traditional journalism.

Technologies of participation: Community news and social media in Northern Sweden

“…In this hybrid form, audiences are seen as being simultaneously consumers and producers of media content (Bruns, 2008;Carpentier, 2011;Jenkins, 2006). While other studies have focused to a large degree on topics such as citizen journalism (Blaagaard, 2013;Holt and Karlsson, 2014), the labour of reporting in a new media setting (Compton and Benedetti, 2010) or the possibilities for audience participation in news production (Domingo et al, 2008), this study seeks to map out the concrete ways in which participation is actually articulated in the everyday sphere of community news workers. In this article, we do not see participation as something fixed but as contingent upon both local circumstances and the complexity of larger social, political and economic factors.…”

Local Journalism when the Journalists Leave Town

“…While participants in hyperlocal media may be highly ambitious (Leckner et al, 2017) and researchers and journalists may have high hopes about their contributions, the outcomes fall short of the mark (Fico et al, 2013;Holt & Karlsson, 2015). The backdrop is that hyperlocal media, for example, struggle to secure long-term financial support and maintain operations, lack necessary journalistic skills, divide their time between hyperlocal journalism and a day job, and have a difficult time getting access to elite sources and institutions (Kurpius et al, 2010;Metzgar et al, 2011;Reich, 2008, van Kerkhoven & Bakker, 2014.…”

Always On: Mobile Culture and Its Temporal Consequences

“…Academic work too has raised serious objections 5 about the significance of the input from non-professional journalists (Buckingham, 2009;Wardle, 2010). We should therefore consider some of the problems with the nature of the videos where the label 'citizen journalism' could be more accurately replaced with participatory (Henig, 2005), witness (Wallace, 2009) or random (Holt and Karlsson, 2014) journalism, particularly when it comes to questions such as the role of the author in mobile video. Because it is common to deal with footage that has no indication of having been obtained with typical journalistic purposes, one could at best argue for the agency of 'witness contributors' (cf.…”