What Is A Citizen?
The word “citizen” can be used in many different ways and has to be clearly understood before engaging in a discussion of citizen journalism. A citizen, in the context of citizen journalism, is not used merely in the legal sense, but rather in the social and political sense; a citizen in such a context can be identified as an individual or a civilian. Jay Rosen explains that citizens are, among other things:
- “potential participants in public affairs”
- “a public with issues to discuss”
- “connected to place and responsible for place”
What Is Citizen Journalism?
If citizens have a responsibility to partake in and contribute to modern society, then citizen journalism could be their outlet. Joyce Y. M. Nip of the Hong Kong Baptist University says that citizen journalism is “where the people are responsible for gathering content, visioning, producing and publishing the news product” (218). This is probably the most accurate definition of citizen journalism. It is the product of independent citizens who create their own content and choose how they want to publish it. This model includes blogs, as well as social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, where users have been producing their own content for years in the form of statuses, photos, and more. Both of these sites can be considered outlets of citizen journalism. Citizen journalism, though typically most prolific on the internet, can be found offline as well; a person or a group of people who write, frame, and distribute their own newspaper are citizen journalists just as much as any blogger on the web.
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