Citizen Journalism in Asia, Europe, North America Region: The State of Knowledge (1990–2013)

Abstract

This research aims at investigating current progress of body of knowledge of citizen journalism from 1990 to 2013 through a document analysis of 55 citizen journalism research studies in Asia, Europe, and North America. Results of the study is divided into two parts. The first includes an analysis of quantitative overview as follows: distribution of data at various periods of time, field sites and research issues, an overview of concepts and theories employed in the research, and an overview of research methods. The second part illustrates an analysis and a synthesis of their results. It reveals that all studies cover the review of citizen journalism from three levels, which are society or community, organization, and the individuals. Consequently, the body of knowledge of citizen journalism is better clarified particularly in the definition of its concept, which is useful to build a deep comprehension of all related concepts. Additionally, the synthesized results also include patterns of news sourcing, application of public and citizen journalism, categories of user-generated content, models of collaborative work among professionals, amateur journalists and public, factors affecting use of citizen journalism of media organizations, roles and impacts of citizen journalism on international media landscape. Ultimately, the findings lead to the fact that nowadays citizen journalism is not a paralleled phenomenon to mainstream media, but it is an influential public sphere or even a counter-public sphere connected to domestic and international media outlets for global populations.