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 aim of this study is to explore how one citizen journalist, Joakim Lamotte, reflects on codes of journalistic standards and ethics. Lamotte is a Swedish citizen journalist who publishes texts reporting on events in society on his Facebook-page. From the Facebook-page, five texts have been sampled for analysis in this study. This is done through using Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis as a methodology. The analysis is supported by Erving Goffman's theory of self presentation and Rom Harré and Luk van Langenhove's positioning theory as theorethical frameworks, to explore Lamotte's self presentation and how he is positioning in his role as a citizen journalist. Some of the main results of the study are that Lamotte uses the term independent journalist in the self presentation of his role, but at times includes himself in the group of the public (his audience). Throughout the samples he positions himself against professional journalists and mainstream media, as a way to reinforce his position as an independent journalist. While doing so, he criticises their choices and justifies his own choices relating to codes of journalistic standards and ethics. The study is an example of one citizen journalist with a large audience, in a Swedish context, reflects on codes of journalistic standards and ethics.