Bottom-up forces in journalism. Citizen journalists produsing news.

Abstract

The rise of what has been described as citizen journalism or ‘grassroots journalism’ presents a new challenge to traditional journalism. Instead of passively absorbing the delivered content of the professional journalists, the news is gathered, selected, edited and communicated by amateurs. ‘The people formely known as the audience’ become both producers and consumers of news and are in this context often referred to as ‘produsers’ or ‘prosumers’. The journalist as a gatekeeper disappears and everyone becomes a ‘gatewatcher’. Many studies have examined how the traditional media react to this trend of audience participation in the professional news production. However, there is a lack of academic research about the citizen journalists themselves. Prior studies indicate that amateur journalists are driven by a need to cover what is not covered by the traditional media, a desire to present a different perspective from the mainstream and the sense of empowerment given to regular people. Put differently, citizens want to be active and involved because they believe that participation is central to successful democracies. However, a lot of questions remain unanswered. Who are these prosumers? Why do they want to produce news content? How is the news making process being shaped? Our paper aims to fill this gap by focusing on the emergence of citizen journalism and prosumers by a theoretical literature review, supported by empirical data from in-depth interviews we conducted at Hasselt Lokaal (www.hasseltlokaal.be) and Gentblogt (www.gentblogt.be), two frequently cited examples of group blogs in Belgium. Hasselt Lokaal was launched in 2005 by the Belgian newspaper company Concentra, and is a citizen-generated platform with news from, for, by and about all inhabitants of Hasselt. Gentblogt however, lauched in 2005, is an unofficial bottom-up city blog maintained by citizens of Ghent themselves. During our research we interviewed the project managers, the moderators and the citizen journalists working at these two blogs. Throughout the interviews we tried to identify the ‘typical’ citizen journalists by uncovering their drives for actively producing content and by looking at the news making process. In order to achieve this goal, we selected articles from Hasselt Lokaal and Gentblogt, and asked the citizen journalists to reflect on their contributions. In this way, our results provide a better insight in the process of citizen journalists’ commitment and social participation, in their motivations to engage in producing content and in the news production dynamics