International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

The history of the idea of → citizen journalism is closely associated with the rapid rise of the → Internet as a medium of → news and public information. Citizens have certainly participated in newsmaking from the start of modern news, but journalism's industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century and later its professionalization marginalized that involvement (→ Journalism, History of ). It was with the rapid growth of the Internet in the 1990s that attempts to conflate the categories of journalist and citizen gathered force. Other terms, including “participatory media,” “network journalism,” and “Journalism 2.0,” have also become popular over time, particularly as producing media on the Internet has become more commonplace and as news practice has begun to accommodate those producers (→ Journalism ; Web 2.0 and the News ). The term “citizen journalism” emerged around the year 2000 as a way of challenging the role of journalism and other dominant institutions in shaping public debate. In the USA this discourse tended to draw on the mixture of countercultural, libertarian, and communitarian ideals that characterized early online communities such as The Well, and to draw on thinkers about journalism and digital media such as Rheingold (e.g. 2002) who were influenced by that model of cyberculture (see Rushkoff 2003 ). Slightly different understandings apply elsewhere. ... log in or subscribe to read full text