Making News with the Citizens! Audience Participation and News-making Practices at the AMH Group

Abstract

ABSTRACT This production-based ethnographic study investigates citizen participation and news-making practices at the Alpha Media Holdings (AMH) group in Zimbabwe. The focus is on the participation of ordinary citizens in previously closed journalistic processes and their everyday news-making practices at a professional news outlet. The study is anchored on the concepts of citizen participation and news-making practices. Data were collected through field observations and interviews in 2018. The findings reveal that citizen participation in news production processes at the AMH group was enabled by digital technologies and organisational policies. However, there were several contextual factors, such as the gendered digital divide, that limited the potential for citizen participation in journalism. Citizen participation was convenient for the AMH group because it tapped into the free labour of citizen journalists in reporting hyperlocal news and in crowdsourcing for news materials, thereby cutting financial costs of hiring correspondents and maintaining bureau offices. The AMH group shifted from traditional to audience-centric news-making practices that relied on digital technologies to put ordinary citizens at the centre of the news-making through structured, unstructured, hybrid and digital practices. This is a de-Westernised contribution to contemporary debates in journalism studies about citizen participation and digital news production practices.