Through in-depth interviews with 12 regular contributors to the Lexington-Herald Leader’s website, www.Kentucky.com, this study attempts to examine how online citizen journalists view the definitions of citizen and professional journalism, as compared to Singer’s three dimensions of professionalism (i.e., cognitive, normative, and evaluative dimensions) as well as their perceived role conceptions of professional and citizen journalists, using Weaver and Wilhoit’s four roles of journalists. Analyses reveal that the main difference in the definitions of the two types of journalists revolved around the cognitive dimension, specifically the education and training that professionals receive. The role conceptions of professional and citizen journalists were similar, with the both groups being described as serving the interpretive/investigative and disseminator roles. The roles of citizen journalists also included the adversarial and populist mobilizer roles.

The media has always gone through changes, starting from the era of the Gutenberg printing press several centuries ago, to the introduction of radio and television in the last 100 years. In the last two decades, Internet and digital technologies have rapidly transformed the media and reshaped how news is gathered and disseminated, and re-defined audiences and their role in the media. Before the Internet, news dissemination was scheduled and periodic, for example the 6pm television bulletin or weekly newspaper. Today news is now global and published in 24/7 round the clock news cycles. At this time, there were clear demarcations between radio, television and newspapers, which were all separate entities. These demarcations have largely fallen away as all media have migrated online to publish on the same platform, using the same elements such as text, audio and video. Increasingly, television is migrating online to the degree that forecasts predict that online television will eclipse traditional TV as we now know it, just as much as online newspapers have eclipsed traditional newspapers. This debate is widely contested In pre-Internet days, the media had distinct demarcations between the media owners, news gatherers (and production people), like journalists, and the audience. These demarcations are blurring as audiences increasingly participate in the media resulting in the emergence of a new breed of journalists; the citizen journalist. This is the most popular term used to describe these new journalists. The dynamic nature of the online platform and functionalities like Web 2.0 made it possible for anyone to publish themselves online, on a blog, on social networking sites or to set up their own website, at very little or no cost. This has spurred a lot of creativity, and the wider public has created vast amounts of content such as video, audio and text and submitted or published them online. Consequently, content creation is no longer the preserve and domain of the media and journalists; the ubiquitous nature of the Internet and the availability of other enabling technologies: inexpensive digital technologies like video cameras, digital cameras and recorders means that anyone with access can now create content and disseminate it. Debates in many parts of the world have suggested that these abilities are catalysts that could spur the public into contributing news and video content of breaking news to the media and help keep the 24/7 round the clock news cycle current. After all, some online social networking sites have already demonstrated that citizens possess the skills to produce and publish video content. At a time when the media is facing financial pressure due to reduced advertising revenues, caused in part by the economic crisis and by the shift to the online platform, there are suggestions that citizens could help newsroom budgets by contributing material. It is against this background of rapid online migration by the media, and the emergence of this new breed of news gatherers, that this research on the Open Newsroom is set. The research topic is not new; a body of research about online migration of the media and the new news ecosystem exists in many other countries. In New Zealand however, this is still an emerging area of for research. This research monitored news bulletins on New Zealand’s two main television news channels, 3 News on TV3 and One News on Television New Zealand for 12 months from early 2008 to late 2009. The idea was to gauge and analyse the amount of content submitted by citizen journalists. The research also looked at a case study which illustrated the potential dangers of using news content submitted by citizen journalists. The research sought the professional opinions of a wide range of decision makers and influential people from the New Zealand media such as editors, journalists and publishers and those involved in the training of journalists in New Zealand. Using a Mini-DV video camera and a digital audio recorder, the researcher filmed and recorded interviewees and edited video clips of the interviews which were then published in the media gallery on the website www.theopennewsroom.com. The interviews sought to find out and discuss the online migration by the media, the new news ecosystem, the public’s participation in the media and the benefits and disadvantages of citizen journalism. To put the research into perspective, the website also carries some research articles and literature reviews on the media. The research findings from the interviews with New Zealand media professionals who participated in the study match trends happening in many countries. While most value the potential benefits of citizen journalists in the news process, some strongly expressed a great deal of skepticism and suspicion regarding news contribution from nontraditional journalism sources. In general, the research offered a series of insights into modern media rather than clear-cut answers

With the rise of internet literacy across the world, men and women on the street are increasingly participating in the news media more than ever before. Early speculations about the influence of citizen journalism imbued the practice with an almost messianic ability to save both journalism and democracy. Whilst these suggestions were influenced by a small amount of data analysis, mainly from Western countries, they were encouraging and demonstrated the potential of citizen journalism in representing the voice of ordinary people. This thesis suggests that citizen journalism is not only promoting the perspective of ordinary citizens, but is also supplementing the coverage of the mainstream media, building relationships, shaping the public sphere, and fulfilling the critical role of a watchdog. Analysing data from a sample of twenty-four different English language citizen journalism sites, this thesis examines the phenomenon of citizen journalism, focusing on the member countries of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation. Employing a mixed methods approach, quantitative and qualitative analyses were undertaken of the data set. The results show that citizen journalism sites in the larger and more developed SAARC countries provide more coverage of news than those in the smaller and underdeveloped countries. Political news is given the highest priority by the majority of the sites whilst news about war and terrorism is given the least. The analysis has also discovered that the sites function as a bridge, bringing people living in different parts of the world together and enabling them to engage in political discourse and the sharing of knowledge and experience. Moreover, citizen journalism is helping people to educate themselves about the culture and political systems of their new countries while also forming their own community online. This was particularly the case with the sites that were owned and operated by the diaspora people living in the West. In addition, with a few exceptions, the majority of the sites make substantial use of supplementary materials to enhance news articles, encouraging readers to participate in interactive news activities, such as posting comments. The study has also found that citizen journalists come from a wide range of backgrounds, from politicians acting as citizen journalists to students aspiring to generate revenues through commercial advertising on the Internet. However, they differ from each other in terms of their news values and news presentation — some of the sites offer more political news than others whilst others behave more like the mainstream media, providing a wide range of news articles. On the other hand, a few of the sites are less active and provide fewer news articles than others. The study has also found that citizen journalists from the SAARC countries include works of fiction as part of their news output, thus offering the slightly different definition of citizen journalism from that in the West.

With emerging content forums blurring the distinctions between journalistic paradigms, this study helps illuminate those which best promote alternative practice. A content analysis of Deepwater Horizon oil spill coverage compared three platforms for online citizen journalism: corporate (CNN iReport), alternative (Indymedia), and independent blogs. News stories were coded for sources, links, author-reader interaction, mobilizing information, tone for the liable parties' ability and intent in handling the disaster, and contestation of official information. Results show that Indymedia was the most alternative in inclusion of mobilizing information, critical tone, contestation of mainstream versions, ratio of alternative links to mainstream, and total usage of alternative sources. iReport engendered the greatest rates of community via interaction, while also averaging the highest ratio of alternative sources. The blogs split on nearly all metrics, as one rated highly in every category and the other near last. This analysis determines which platforms are most likely to cultivate disaster news that stands as alternative to, and not extension of, the mainstream. This study makes a contribution to the theory of alternative media and is the first to compare citizen journalism sites against one another in measuring their adherence to the alternative paradigm, and its examination of CNN's citizen-report model also represents a novel contribution. The findings discussed may help direct citizens as they reach out to online communities in times of disaster.

The thesis aims to analyse how human rights issues are reported by different types of transnational media channels – professional and citizen. More specifically, the human rights related articles published during 2016 in citizen media website Global Voices and two mainstream media channels – The Guardian and Al-jazeera English are analysed in a quantitative way and compared. The key focus of the analysis is drawn on theories about human rights representation in media, continuum of professionalism in the period of digitisation and globalisation of news. The quantitative content analysis helped to determine that there are more similarities in human rights representation in terms of content of information, than in the tools which are chosen to present human rights.

This research will analyze the radio station ONUCI FM, UN’s peace radio in Côte d’Ivoire. The central focus is on journalists’ perception of their role as professional advocacy for peace and democracy. Personal interviews with five ONUCI FM-journalists provide the primary source of qualitative source. In light of the Security Council’s decision to end UN’s peacekeeping mission in Côte d’Ivoire in 2017 followed an uncertainty of ONUCI FM’s future before it was decided that the station would continue to broadcast under the Felix Houphouët-Boigny foundation. This research attempts to elucidate the consequences in similar previous cases. This research shows that the UN often lacks a long-term plan of how to handle their stations when their mission ends, thereby creating an indisputable journalistic vacuum where they previously operated. This research shows that few UN radios are capable of surviving without donations but that leaving abruptly may cause harm to the achieved peace. With the intention to provide a solution to the vacuum created after the UN this research explores the possibilities of citizen journalists filling the void after the organization’s withdrawal. This research argues that Citizen Journalism is a suitable substitute to Peace Journalism when UN radio stations stop broadcasting. Applied theories are Peace Journalism, Journalism ethics and Citizen Journalism. All theories are applicable in the analysis of journalists as nation builders, government partners, and agents of empowerment and also as watchdogs. In conclusion, the purpose of this research is to understand the journalist's own experience of working at ONUCI FM and to analyze if a radio station such as ONUCI FM, when no longer supported by the UN, can benefit of Citizen Journalism.

This thesis explores how gender inequality in the photographic staff of the main Colombian media outlets, has established a hegemonic view of representation and examines the way recent social outbursts in the country, have been the ideal setting for the rise of citizen journalism, visual activism, and new visual citizenships. It seeks to present how diverse individuals, including female photojournalists are producing alternative visual narratives and igniting a paradigm shift on traditional photojournalism. By embracing new digital visualities and depictions of the other, these individuals are confronting traditional media organizations, questioning their visual narratives, inclusion, and representation policies.   Positioned from a Phenomenological and Feminist Media Theory standpoint, this project aims to observe this phenomenon from the bottom up, building from the experiences of the subject’s study. This project will consider emotions, affections lived experiences of three Colombian female photojournalists in active exercise of their profession, who will take part of this study, and those experiences will be basic inputs of interpretation. I contend that not sufficient research has been done on this topic, and expose an evident research gap, existing in Latin-American and Colombian Media Studies, since it’s connected to new technologies, recent social change and in general, a phenomenon still developing. Drawing from a Phenomenological Psychology field methodology, data will be obtained through semi-structured interviews and examined with coding and interpretation tools provided by this discipline. This study concludes how the female body becomes a political and visual signifier exercising an embodied practice in photojournalism, but also by emotions connected to what they are seeing through their lenses, which in turn, produces affective visualities and narratives many times, opposed to the claims of objectivity, rationality and newsworthiness traditional journalism stands for.

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With the rapid growth in the number of new media platforms in China, a large number of Internet users have been turned into citizen journalism accounts. With the digital transformation of official media, many citizen journalism accounts are often pulled into news production by official media to co-produce content. On the Chinese Internet, citizen journalism not only plays the role of challenging and influencing agenda-setting and public opinion, but also takes on the task of propagating ideology and values. This thesis explored this phenomenon of journalistic practice by using generic news frames and propaganda theories as theoretical foundations. Meanwhile, this study used mainly quantitative content analysis as research method, exploring the characteristics of news videos produced by Chinese citizen journalism accounts in collaboration with official media, and what propaganda techniques were used to help legitimize authoritarian rule. This study examined 432 collaborative videos on bilibili published by CCTV between 2020 and 2023. The findings suggest that collaborative videos tend to produce soft news with positive human interest and morality frames, while negative news mainly targets foreign countries' conflicts. Furthermore, collaborative videos mainly use soft propaganda and public opinion guidance to disseminate values and ideologies that are in line with the national interest and lead the audience to support the CPC and the government's political governance, which legitimizes authoritarian rule. These results illustrate how Chinese citizen journalism in the propaganda field contributes to the propaganda strategy of the party and the government, how it has been used to legitimize authoritarian rule, and why its characteristics are significantly different from those of the Western scholars.