The Printed Rise of the Common Man

Abstract

Journalists have traditionally focused on a small range of elite sources. Far less attention went to ordinary or common people, resulting in little visibility for that community in news output. However, bottom-up Web 2.0 technologies have given common people new communication tools, allowing them to disperse information autonomously. This has made traditional news media aware of a public desire for bottom-up participation in the news production process. Accordingly, some news media have begun to offer their own participation features. Bearing this context in mind, we address the question whether Web 2.0 has helped increase the visibility and importance of the common people in daily news output. Via a content analysis of five Flemish newspapers, the current representation of ordinary citizens is compared to a decade ago, before the appearance Web 2.0. The analysis shows that citizens appear more prominently in the news nowadays.

Answering for Islam: Journalistic and Islamic Conceptions of Authority

“…"Real people" also feature as a category of sources in David Kennamer and Jeff South's comparison of civic and traditional news coverage of the 2000 election in the state of Virginia (Kennamer and South 2002, p. 43). More recently, and outside of the US context, where so much of the research on civic journalism has taken place, scholars have noted how technology has increased the presence and prominence of "ordinary people" in Belgian newspapers (De Keyser and Raeymaeckers 2012). A team of Dutch scholars concurred but determined that this presence was largely through the use of "vox pops" and thus not a substantive contribution to the news (Kleemans et al 2015).…”

Citizen Journalism vs. Mainstream Journalism: A Study on Challenges Posed by Amateurs

“…Newspapers tend to be more interested in engaging audiences over a wider range of non-UGC material in a way that can drive revenue. De Keyser and Raeymaeckers (2011) argued that citizen journalism had forced traditional media to change the relationship with their public. Traditional news media now offer features on their own websites similar to those on the citizen journalism sites.…”

Dancing in the Dark: Source Coordination and Strategic Media Alliances in the Health Field

“…In accordance with prevailing media logic(s) (Altheide and Snow 1979;Landerer 2013), less powerful groups can therefore attract attention through conflict and personification (see Molotch and Lester 1974;Manning 2001;De Bruycker and Beyers 2015). In particular, the populist demand for human exemplars and personal storytelling has increased the representation of identity groups and ordinary citizens in the mainstream media (Binderkrantz, Christiansen and Pedersen 2015; Keyser and Raeymaeckers 2012;Stroobant, De Dobbelaer and Raeymaeckers 2018a).…”