Citizen Journalism

In the last decade, a population of over 3.5 million refugees, largely fleeing war in Syria, has settled in Turkey. This segment of society is often mischaracterized in mainstream media, their voices and perspectives are not heard, and they are not targeted as an audience as news is largely produced in Turkish language. Many Syrians in Turkey rely on Syrian-based news agencies, although an ethnic-based media has also emerged to serve the needs and interests of Syrians living in Turkey. This chapter draws on in-depth interviews (n = 12) conducted via electronic media of 11 Syrian ethnic journalists working in Turkey and 1 employee working at an NGO concerned with refugee media. The analysis highlights the voices and perspectives of Syrian ethnic journalists serving their constituents in Turkey, whose purpose is not only to serve the information-seeking needs to Syrian refugees, but also to express a broader perspective on Syrians in today’s Turkey. Subsequent sections explore the role of Syrian ethnic media in reducing discrimination against Syrians. Final sections reflect on the role of ICTs in Syrian ethnic media in Turkey and some broader implications of the findings.

Radio is an old medium that seems to struggle to renew itself. With the switchover from analogue to digital and the necessity to keep up with consumer demand and expectations, radio has been regularly deemed to be obsolete. Radio as a primetime media died, but radio also morphed into something else. During the French occupy movement Nuit Debout in April 2016, people who were walking around Place de la République-the Parisian heart of the protest-might have been surprised to discover Radio Debout ("radio stand up"). Why one should contribute to such a radio when Internet and social networks prevail? With the idea that micro-radio broadcasting holds the potential to empower ordinary people at the local community level, radio-activism is tinkering its way back against the overriding force of computer-mediated technologies. An earlier version of this piece appeared on inaglobal.fr, the online journal of the French National audiovisual institute (INA).

« Revolt on the air - Radio Activism, Protest and French Politics », Explosivepolitics.com, 28/12/2016, http://explosivepolitics.com/blog/revolt-on-the-air-radio-activism-protest-and-french-politics/

This essay posits American journalism as a particular realm of public knowledge production, inflected with its own professional practices as well as the way in which those practices subjugate technologies of representation. Taking the Arab Spring of 2011 as a case study in journalistic knowledge production, this article analyzes three epistemological conditions underscoring the Arab Spring’s development as an object of knowledge: the use of social media tools within the practice of journalism, the representational authority of the individual reporter, and the articulation of journalistic knowledge to broader institutions of liberal democratic power. While these are by no means the only possible themes of investigation, by looking at how journalistic practices rendered the Arab Spring sensible and worthy of public consideration, this essay hopes to reveal them as temporally and technologically contingent, but also linked to the values of liberal democracy that undergird journalism’s role in American public life.

Brazil Beginning in June 2013, Brazil was struck by a series of explosive, chaotic, and oft-violent protests. Rallying around the slogan " A Gigante Accordou " (" The Giant Has Awakened "), these protests were the largest displays of citizens taking to the street since the end of the military dictatorship in the 1980s. 1 Though the demonstrators raised multiple grievances including reckless public spending on mega-events like the Olym-pics and the World Cup, entrenched governmental corruption, and the arbitrary raising of public transportation fares, one of the most common claims was an intense dissatisfaction with the way the nation's news media were failing to represent the views of the Brazilian citizenry. When observing this situation, international commentators writing for media outlets from the Wall Street Journal to the Guardian observed that the protests were throwing into clear relief a dissatisfaction over oligopoly control of mainstream media and its impact on information access and news production. In turn, the protests offered what many international journalists called the " beginning of an alternative media sphere in Brazil. " 2 At the center of the shifting media landscape was a social media–based citizen journalism project calling itself " MídiaNINJA. " Launched in late 2012, NINJA (a Portuguese acronym for " Independent Narratives, Journalism, and Action) has received copious attention for using footage recorded on mobile phones and aired via social media to record police violence and unsanctioned arrests during the 2013 protests. Publically besmirching mainstream news conglomerates like the Globo Network, NINJA claims that it is opening up a new space for Brazilian citizens to make media. 3 While it officially " launched " in 2012, NINJA grew directly out of and was incubated by Fora do Eixo (FDE), a much larger arts and culture organization. While FDE initially focused more on organizing music festivals and public art installations than promoting citizen journalism, its explicit focus on opening chapters and sponsoring events outside of preexisting cultural hubs like Rio, São Paulo, and Recife laid a foundation that NINJA would use to establish many of its own regional centers. On the technological level, NINJA draws heavily on both the recording functions of smart phones and the distributional capabilities of social networking sites including TwitCasting, Twitter,

This is a governmental report (SOU 2015:94) from the Media Inquiry (Medieutredningen).

The Media inquiry involved Anette Novak, Göran Blomberg, Sookia Carlsson, Lukasz Lindell, Martina Wagner and Oscar Westlund

The book has mainly been authored by Anette Novak, Göran Blomberg and Oscar Westlund.

El tramado social en Perú se ha ido construyendo a través de constantes corrientes migratorias que ha llevado a los grupos rurales buscar mejores condiciones de vida (educación, salud y trabajo), generando una gran aglutinación en la ciudad y un deseo persistente en mantener sus patrones culturales, a pesar que estas se han visto expuestas al relato de la modernidad que narra la ciudad, por lo que se ha tenido que enfrentar a ella desde la construcción de la diversidad.
Esta investigación, busca a través del uso práctico de los medios de comunicación, en especial de la radio, comprender este proceso integrador de los nuevos grupos dentro del relato ciudadano frente a los hegemónicos, con la finalidad de brindar un escenario articulado y diverso, el cual permita integrar el componente de multiculturalidad al discurso de la modernidad, necesario en la estabilidad de la sociedad.
Bajo esta perspectiva y como unidad de análisis, la Comunidad Shipiba de Cantagallo, los grupos de migrantes pueden experimentar cómo la apertura de un medio de comunicación alternativo puede brindar y facilitar la articulación social, hacia un nuevo escenario comunicativo que permita dar vigencia al relato construido por un grupo no hegemónico.

The challenges and constraints to visibility in a perpetual state of emergency are what underwrite and impel the content and form of – door open – (2019), a three-channel film installation by ZouZou Group. This collective is formed of two anonymous female artists, one living in Syria, the other in England, who have shared video clips and photographs with each other that were recorded between 2014 and 2018 in Damascus and countries that impacted the course of the Syrian civil war, such as England, Germany and Russia. The various difficulties the two artists encountered in their exchange have come to determine the visual language, structure and substance of this artwork. Therefore, without showing violence, – door open – exposes the dangerous conditions of its creation by manifesting the effects of warfare on the formal processes of its production.

On October 3, 2008, a post on CNN’s iReport, a citizen journalism social network website, reported that Steve Jobs suffered a massive heart attack, spurring a decline in Apple’s stock. The story’s falsehood was quickly discovered, and the credibility of CNN and citizen journalism was thus called into question. The purpose of this article is to analyze those ethical questions and the relationship of citizen journalism to traditional media outlets.

Specifically, I investigate how the ethics of citizen journalism have changed since the Steve Jobs incident. I consider the improvement of the tools of production and their impact on workflow within a digital newsroom as they relate to the decision-making processes of the leadership within a journalistic organization. I examine key ethical decisions  from the viewpoint of multiple actors within the organization, as those actors influence the speed of production within the network and what content is released to the general public.

The chapter begins with historical and theoretical analyses of the iReport event and its ethical aspects. The historical analysis derives from a study of the articles published during the time of the misreported story (i.e. October 2008 to January 2009). Beyond the initial analysis of the iReport event, the case study is centered on the context of other issues relating to citizen journalism since October 2008. In particular, the case study examines the internal and external code of ethics followed by news organizations that partner with citizen journalists. By doing so, I hope to ascertain a lineage of ethical evolution.

The case study concludes by discussing the current state of citizen journalism and its future within traditional journalistic organizations. The conclusion presents takeaways that future scholars may reference when studying the connection between ethical codes and citizen journalism.

Twitter is a social news service in which information is selected and distributed by individual members of the tweet audience. While communication literature has studied traditional news media and the propagation of information, to our knowledge there have been no studies of the new social media and their impacts on the propagation of news during extreme event situations. This exploration attempts to build an understanding of how preexisting hyperlink structures on the Web and different types of information channels affect Twitter audiences’ information selection. The study analyzes the concentration of user-selected information sources in Twitter about the 2009 Israel-Gaza conflict. There are three findings. First, a statistical test of a power-law structure revealed that, while a wide range of information was selected and redistributed by Twitter users, the aggregation of these selections over-represented a small number of prominent websites. Second, binomial regression analyses showed that Twitter user selections were not constituted randomly but were affected by the number of hyperlinks received and the types of information channels. Third, temporal analyses revealed that sources via social media channels were more prominently selected especially in the later stages of the news information lifespan.

The Syrian revolution has brought about the creation of a pop-up news ecology, an entirely new, oppositional news system fueled by citizen activists’ use of social media to report on the conflict. Drawing on Castell’s Network Society, this essay assesses the ways such a system came into being, finding a dearth of professional journalism, rapidity of its formation, and assistance by external “connectors” as key factors. This case study provides a potential model for the ways pop-up news ecologies may form in other authoritarian countries.

This course invites students to develop a crossmedia mode of thinking about storytelling in a converged media environment. Students will learn the basics of researching, organizing and telling stories effectively across multiple media platforms (e.g., print, audio, video, and the web) and a variety of social contexts (e.g., public relations, blogging, journalism, speeches, etc.).

Hadi al Abdullah is one of the most famous citizen journalists and activists in the Syrian Uprising. His Facebook page has more than 74,000 followers “like”. He is also known for his endless efforts to help the wounded victims and the people trapped in the old city of Homs. Prior to the start of the Syrian revolution, Hadi Al Abdullah was a lecturer at the nursing school of Baath University. He used to change his voice when contacting Media Networks for the safety of his family. He revealed his identity and started to use his real voice and show his face after his family escaped to Jordan.

This essay assesses how the intersection of blogging and journalism is changing the nature of news. An economic concept, the informal or black market economy, is introduced as a metaphor for understanding the ways in which blogs are different from and similar to mainstream or "formal" journalism and what these differences tell us about the future of journalism.

Fiji’s media landscape has been challenged by the consequences of Fiji’s own political struggles (Pareti, 2009; Perrottet & Robie, 2011; Singh, 2010a; S. B. Singh, 2018). While scholars and policy analysts have pointed out the nuances of these consequences, the latest onslaught to Fiji’s media landscape is irresponsible citizen journalism, specifically the morbid use of social media. Social media in Fiji has grown exponentially due to the increasing interconnectivity and proliferation of affordable data and mobile devices. This has enabled greater access and active online interactions, creating a massive potential for responsible and constructive social media use. However, ease of online access has revealed an almost inhumane and morbid form of social media use. This Brief argues that Fiji’s media landscape, already challenged by Fiji’s political struggles, is facing pressure from irresponsible citizen journalism. This is compounded by the quick pace and real time nature of social media. In discussing this argument, the Brief examines a recent fatality that highlights this pressure and its implications on the media and social media in Fiji.

Citizen journalism is emerging as a powerful phenomenon across Africa. The rise of digitally-networked technologies such as the Internet and mobile phones is reshaping reporting across the continent. This change is technological – with social media platforms enabling new forms of publishing, receiving, and discussing stories – as well as cultural – with idiosyncratic conventions emerging on these platforms. This study surveys the ethical beliefs of citizen journalists in several sub-Saharan African countries. We find that they are driven by a sense of social responsibility and a wish to inform their readers and the general public. Citizen journalists show a clear anti- authoritarian strain and an antipathy towards government regulation, yet most see themselves as subject to the same ethics that guide traditional journalism. We then investigate the implications of these ethics for the emerging networked public sphere. The emergence of a digitally-networked public sphere has been hail...

Arguably the best media coverage of the student strike in Montreal is coming from an unexpected source – CUTV, or what is now called Community-University TV (formerly Concordia University TV). Live streaming nearly every protest, demonstration and march since the start of the strike, their viewership has grown
incrementally to rival that of much larger news organizations, with viewership over 10,000 on peak nights. Mainstream news stations have been lifting CUTV’s footage from the internet, interviewing their reporters, and have now started to enter into agreements to obtain footage (Shingler, May 24, 2012). What makes CUTV’s coverage so unique?

Last November, a YouTube video portraying a young boy rescuing an even younger girl from what seemed to be a hail of bullets went viral and hit the headlines.  The video, titled “SYRIA! SYRIAN HERO BOY rescue girl in shootout,” demonstrated both the promise and pitfall of social media for the public generation of accounts and accountability.  On the one hand, the spread of this video demonstrated how social media facilitates the participation of new communicators.  On the other, the BBC eventually debunked this video as a fake, funded by the Norwegian Film Institute and Arts Council Norway and shot by a Norwegian director in Malta on a set used by blockbuster films Troy and Gladiator, using professional child actors.  Social media’s affordance of misinformation is a problem not just for the information professionals trying to parse the wheat from the chaff, but also for the civilian witnesses trying to publicize their documentation.  This is because well-publicized incidents of misinformation reinforce gatekeepers’ verification barrier between private information and public evidence.

In this chapter, I demonstrate how professional human rights fact-finders can be understood, after Bourdieu, as a field characterized by an information logic governed by verification.  In contrast, civilian witnesses – particularly at the accidental rather than activist end of the spectrum – can be thought of as a non-field. The verification of social media information depends on digital information forensics, a rapidly evolving field combining new verification technologies with tried and tested gumshoe techniques.  These verification strategies are part of the cultural capital of the human rights fact-finding field, distributed via the networks or social capital within the field.  The flipside of these verification strategies are verification subsidies, which, after Gandy’s concept of information subsidies, are characteristics sources can supply with their information to make it easier for others to verify; these include a digital footprint to facilitate the source’s identification.  Part of the usefulness of Gandy’ concept is that it is an economic metaphor that highlights the connection between the ability to provide information subsidies and the possession of other types of resources.  The implication for civilian witnesses is that those with the least amount of symbolic capital in the form of digital footprints and the least amount of cultural capital in the form of understanding verification (in part because they are not part of a networked field) will have the most trouble in getting their social media information verified; it is often those with the least resources, however, who most need access to the public accountability mechanism of human rights.  The chapter concludes with considering how the phenomenon of third party verification subsidies, both human and machine, might lower the verification barrier.

The purpose of the study is to compare the available regional open data resources and regional projects by using them. Based on existing researches of the open data situation in Russia, it is concluded that, despite the current problems Russia have got the necessary conditions for the widespread implementation of data journalism in practice of media. There are numerous examples of successful cases of this kind of journalism. But in general, opportunities haven’t completely materialized. This gap is investigated by the example of Tyumen region. The Tyumen region has sufficiently high position in the transparency rankings of regional authorities. The online platform for publishing open data in Tyumen region is identified and described. Using data published on this platform has been examined by monitoring of rеgional media. A few examples of published media content with the use of datasets published on the government open data platforms were identified. A search of Hyperlinks to the platforms in the project Yandex. News gave zero results. The survey of the Tyumen journalists shows the level of awareness about data journalism and available platforms for publication open data. The most of participants of survey know a few platforms of open data, but they are not aware of the method and tools of data journalism and prefer using data from press-releases, official reports and other products of the data analysis performed by organizations and experts to raw materials. However particular journalists aware about data driven journalism and its tools and use the open data for their articles. We can conclude the underexploitation of resources of open data in Tyumen media. Whereas some particular journalists are capable of using open data, regional media haven’t started implementation of data journalism into regular practice yet. All have been due to the short term since the beginning of publication open data on regional platforms. So we can say that regional media has great potential for innovation.

With the increase in citizen-generated news, the need to understand how individual predispositions interact with news sources to influence perceptions of news credibility becomes increasingly important. Using a web-based experiment, this study examines the influences individual predispositions toward the media and politics have on perceived credibility of mainstream and citizen journalism. Analyzing data
drawn from a representative sample of the U.S. adult population, results indicate that media skepticism and political cynicism interact, such that cynics and skeptics perceive citizen journalism as more credible, while non-cynics and non-skeptics think mainstream journalism is more credible.

Internet has emerged as a communication tool
by the 20 th century. It has fast become widespread and
spread into all areas of life. Thanks to the developments
appeared with internet, content such as audio, moving

images, text and pictures have become easily reach-
able. Especially in recent years, there has been remark-
able improvements in terms of accessing to information

and dissemination of the internet which has eliminated

the concept of space-time, this new technology has be-
come an indispensable tool for reporting industry. In

this regard, reporting format made through either print
media or visual media has been influenced by the new

type of mass communication and it has emerged the

concept of internet journalism. In the context of this re-
search, it has been analyzed how the reporting format

has been shaped on the print media and the internet, in
case of the newspaper of ‘The Independent’. Therefore,
the report titled ‘Ukraine Crisis’ published on 2nd May,
2014 has been compared how to handle in the printed
version and on the website, and it is discussed what
are the differences between traditional journalism and
online journalism, and also it is attempted to provide a
discussion about the future of online journalism.

This paper looks at how citizen journalism is shifting the power from traditional media and its influence on the general public. This paper also particularly focuses on the Occupy Wall Street movement, which incidentally sparked similar Occupy movements around the world.

In the world of technology-mediated communication (TMC), the involvement of audiences with media texts takes very diverse forms. The participation is shaped by multiple factors ranging from the genre of the media text (e.g., the news article as opposed to the radio phone-in program), the general participatory situation (e.g., before/after a story or event and within/outside of the text), to the interactive affordances of the individual media platforms (print, radio, TV, online).
Adopting a combined media linguistic and socio-pragmatic perspective, this chapter explores the types of interactivity and interaction that occur in the media. Focusing on online news media, it explains how media interactivity can translate into actual interaction with the recipients, thereby affecting the overall participation framework of the media discourse event. Finally, the chapter outlines several current trends (customization of content, remediation, dispreferred participation, etc.) and points out some potential problems associated with these participatory phenomena.

Neste artigo buscamos responder o que é, afinal, Jornalismo de Guerrilha. Empreendemos uma revisão de literatura evidenciando definições e dimensões ao mesmo tempo complementares e contraditórias para tal noção. Colocamos à prova nossa compreensão com a análise do fenômeno do Mídia Ninja, observando mais especificamente suas transmissões simultâneas, para verificar como o coletivo desenvolve suas formas de atuação e se ele se enquadra ou não em tal nos aspectos que caracterizam tal noção conceitual. Ao final, tecemos considerações que sinalizam o caráter exploratório da apreciação frente ao fenômeno observado e a complexidade em delimitar o conceito pretendido.

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

SAAT artikel ini disusun, publik Amerika Serikat (AS) dan dunia dikejutkan dengan kemenangan Donald Trump kandidat presiden dari Partai Republik atas kursi kepresidenan AS . Tak hanya warga AS, banyak pimpinan dari berbagai negara terkejut dengan kekalahan Hillary Clinton pada pemilihan presiden ke-45 tersebut. Karena kemenangan Trump yang ‘tak disangka-sangka’ tersebut, sejumlah pengamat tak hanya mengkritisi lembaga polling melainkan juga media massa maupun online AS.