Who are Citizen Journalists in the Social Media Environment?

Abstract

The study examined the personal and social contexts which encourage or help to maintain individuals’ engagement in citizen journalism tasks. Drawing on the perspective of social capital, this study examines whether social media use, social network, social capital, and civic skills help to predict the degree of engagement in producing citizen journalism, especially on Twitter and Facebook. Findings demonstrate that bridging capital—connecting to gain new ideas and experiences—was a powerful predictor of citizen journalism activities on Facebook, whereas bonding capital—connecting with close, trusted acquaintances—strongly predicted less citizen journalism activity. Personal factors including social media use and individual civic skills were the most powerful predictors of citizen journalism activities on Twitter. In general, Twitter use fosters active citizen journalism behaviors, and those with civic skills prefer Twitter over Facebook as a medium for citizen journalism.

• KeyWords
• citizen journalism
• Facebook
• social capital
• social media
• social network
• Twitter

Notes

1. Separate analyses were also conducted in which non-users of Facebook and Twitter were omitted from the sample. This was done because it is obvious that non-users would not post or share political information through these social media. However, most differences were negligible. The only differences of note were that use of Facebook and Twitter became less important as correlates with citizen journalism activities via these media (though the difference was not large), and that bonding capital was more strongly (and still inversely) related with citizen journalism activities on Twitter. It was decided to include non-users in the study’s analysis, as non-use is relevant to other independent variables: for example, it is reasonable to predict that someone with low civic skills, or with low bridging capital, would likely be a non-user of social media.