How the Person in the Street Became a Journalist:Social Media and the Second Wave of Citizen Journalism

Prof. Axel BrunsDigital Media Research CentreQueensland University of TechnologyBrisbane, Australiaa.bruns@qut.edu.au – @snurb_dot_info

Indymedia and the ‘Battle for Seattle’

(http://autonomousuniversity.org/content/j18-seattle-indymedia)

The First Wave of Citizen Media• Citizen journalism:

– Indymedia in the 1999 World Trade Organisation protests– ‘Open publishing’: new platforms enable alternative media– Activist, collectively edited, volunteer-driven publications

• Before and after Indymedia:– Mixture of collaborative platforms and individual news blogs– Some important new voices emerge – e.g. Drudge Report, Huffington Post– News enthusiasts and political junkies – wide range of skills and insights

• Largely second-tier (Herbert Gans):– Dissemination, analysis, and critique of mainstream media coverage– Gatewatching: observing the content of others, sharing what seems relevant– News as process: focus on continuing coverage, not individual articles

Assessing Citizen Journalism• Enthusiastic but unsustainable:

– Short-term Seattle activism very different from long-term engagement– Emergence of leading voices; others fall away– ‘Open publishing’ model invites spam and trolling

• Some successes:– Bloggers accredited as journalists at 2004 U.S. presidential nominating conventions– Clinton/Lewinsky, Trent Lott, Dan Rather scandals and more– Australian ‘blog wars’ of 2007

• Professional and scholarly recognition:– ‘Random acts of journalism’ (JD Lasica)– ‘My readers know more than I do’ (Dan Gillmor)– ‘The people formerly known as the audience’ (Jay Rosen)

Normalising Citizen Journalism• From boundary work…

– Dismissal of citizen journalists as amateurs and armchair journalists– Rallying around journalistic ideals such as objectivity and verification– ‘The Internet, at its ugliest, is just an open sewer’ (Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times)

• … to gradual acceptance:– Rebadging of opinion columns as ‘blogs’ (but without post-publication engagement)– Addition of user commentary threads to published articles– CNN iReport and BBC UGC Hub initiatives

• Normalisation (Jane B. Singer):– User involvement no longer particularly unusual (but clearly segregated)– ‘Blogs’ now so widespread that usage of the term has declined By the mid-2000s, citizen journalism had been tamed

Enter Social Media

The Second Wave of Citizen Media• #BREAKING:

– Eyewitness reporting and real-time news curation– Several major break-through moments: natural disasters, political crises, cultural and sporting events– Twitter especially prominent here, due to platform affordances

• Social media news curation:– Rapid accumulation of ad hoc publics– Collective, collaborative curation of news and analysis– Gradual emergence of leading curators: domain experts and journalists

• Twitter as an ambient news network (Alfred Hermida):– Always on, always in the background– Breaking news events rise to prominence through repetition and trending hashtags– Platform for serendipitous news discovery, for both ordinary citizens and professional journalists

Habitual Acts of Journalism• Beyond the random:

– Social news sharing now a widespread practice across all platforms– 52% of Internet users (NOR: 47%) are proactive or reactive participants (Digital News Report 2016)– From random to habitual acts of news sharing and commenting

• Social filtering:– News sharing through social media a source of news for 51% (NOR: 54%)– Social sharing reaches some traditionally reluctant consumers of mainstream news– News shared by trusted connections may be more persuasive

• Demoticisation:– No democratisation of news participation – but a demoticisation– Distributed, decentralised news engagement – very small contributions that add up to big trends– Emergence of important news and analysis through loosely coordinated, aggregate activities

And Professional Journalism?• Conflicted response from newsworkers:

– Renewed attempts at boundary work (“Twitter is the worst”, “foulest language” – Chris Mitchell)– Genuine exploration and acceptance– Emergence of the journalist as a personal brand

• A different playing field:– From ‘site vs. site’ to social media as neutral (?) ‘third space’ (Scott Wright)– No real functional difference between accounts of individuals, journalists, news organisations, …– Social sanctions against mere broadcast communication in social media

• New practices, new practitioners:– Social media for sourcing, dissemination, engagement – and more opinion than before– Social media as invisible backchannel to sources and newsmakers– Social media as environment for news curation rather than news reporting – also in liveblogs

(Adamic & Glance 2005)

And Society?

And Society?

(Smith et al. 2014)

A New Media Ecology• Substantial fears about the cohesion of society:

– Breakdown of ‘the’ public sphere that unites us all– ‘Echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ undermining informed democracies– Emergence of fact-resistant political movements (Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, …)

• But also:– Emergence of ‘monitory democracy’ practices (John Keane)– News reaching new audiences through social sharing– Pluralisation of debate through multiple overlapping publics

• What is needed?– Move beyond argument from personal impressions and pointillistic anecdotes– Large-scale, longitudinal empirical studies of news flows across multiple platforms– Incorporation of emerging ‘big data’ analytics techniques into media and communication research

http://mappingonlinepublics.net/ @snurb_dot_info

@socialmediaQUT – http://socialmedia.qut.edu.au/ @qutdmrc – https://www.qut.edu.au/research/dmrc

This research is funded by the FRISAM project “The Impact of Social Media on Agenda-Setting in Election Campaigns”, and by the Australian Research Council through Future Fellowship and LIEF grants FT130100703 and LE140100148.