THINKING ABOUT CITIZEN JOURNALISM

Abstract

This study seeks to understand how community newspaper editors negotiate the professional complexities posed by citizen journalism—a phenomenon that, even in the abstract, would appear to undermine their gatekeeping control over content. Through interviews with 29 newspaper editors in Texas, we find that some editors either favor or disfavor the use of citizen journalism primarily on philosophical grounds, while others favor or disfavor its use mainly on practical grounds. This paper presents a mapping of these philosophical-versus-practical concerns as a model for visualizing the conflicting impulses at the heart of a larger professional debate over the place and purpose of user-generated content in the news production process. Moreover, these findings are viewed in light of gatekeeping, which, we argue, offers a welcome point of entry for the study of participatory media work as it evolves at news organizations large and small alike. In contributing to a growing body of literature on user-generated content in news contexts, this study points to the need for better understanding the causes and consequences of journalism's hyperlocal turn, as digitization enables newswork to serve increasingly niche geographic and virtual communities.

Keywords:

• authority
• community
• gatekeeping
• participatory journalism
• professionalism
• user-generated content

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank graduate student Harsh Kalan and undergraduate students Kaitlin Lawrence, Jordan Smothermon, and Thomas Upchurch, all of the University of Texas at Austin, for their assistance in this study.

Notes

1. While scholars often refer to the emergence of user-generated news content as participatory journalism (e.g., Deuze et al., 2007; Domingo et al., 2008), for this paper we will primarily use citizen journalism because it is the more commonly understood term in the newspaper trade discourse—and, as such, it was used in our interviews (e.g., editors were asked what they thought of citizen journalism, not participatory journalism).

2. For the latest figures, see www.stateofthemedia.org and www.graphicdesignr.net/papercuts.

3. Source: http://www.texaspress.com/index.php/publications/messenger/messenger-archives/93-circulation-drops-in-2007-semis-keep-best-record.

4. We oversampled daily newspapers in order to achieve a fairly balanced representation of daily and non-daily newspaper editors in our sample. As it turned out, of the 29 editors we interviewed, 12 were from daily newspapers and the other 17 from non-dailies.

5. 4-H is a youth organization affiliated with the US Department of Agriculture.