David Tewksbury and Jason Rittenberg News on the Internet: and Citizenship in the 21st Century. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012. 197 pp.Jane B. Singer, Alfred Hermida, David Domingo, Ari Heinonen, Steve Paulussen, Thorsten Quandt, Zvi Reich, and Marina Vujnovic Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 227 pp.News on the Internet and Participatory Journalism offered a useful blend of theory and best practices for my graduate seminar in communication and technology. Each book has its strengths and weaknesses, but together they helped frame a lively discussion about the path going forward for journalists, as well as audience members.Tewksbury and Rittenberg contrast the era before online news with the current age of mobile media, content creation, interaction and conversation. News audiences are made up of citizens in a way that requires another look at classic media sociology and research. Through blogs, microblogs and various social media sites, private citizens are contributing to the social and political lives of nations (p. 11).The trend of information control shifting away from a few powerful entities toward smaller outlets and even citizens is a type of information democratization (p. 11). result, Tewksbury and Rittenberg suggest, is a shiftin habits, functions, and competition through fragmentation.While optimists see these changes with an eye toward correcting the shortcomings of traditional media, the authors acknowledge that the emerging model also supports biases and polarization. Diffusion cycles bring change, and this book places new uses within a history of media replacement over many decades. It carefully reviews the evidence for replacement and nonreplacement, but old media and new media are seen as in a struggle for attention and use.At the same time, there is worry about those leftbehind by the digital divide, which grows when state-of-the-art broadband speeds do not reach everyone: The quality of is arguably questionable if a significant portion of the citizenry cannot participate in the dominant media of their society (p. 39).Hyperlinks from blog content to mainstream sites be the most significant difference between the Web and print (p. 48). Tewksbury and Rittenberg do not settle the conceptual fuzziness between blogs and other sites-WordPress templates blur the distinction-but they try through three blog characteristics: (1) Reverse chronological structure, (2) Individual authorship, and (3) [R]elative speed (p. 50). Citing the Project for Excellence in Journalism (2006), they note that [a]nalyses of cross-site linking practices of blogs indicate that a substantial portion of posts use mainstream news as a starting point (p. 50). When it comes to media sites, media agendas still matter. Tewksbury and Rittenberg identify medium specialization, topic-based segmentation, style-based segmentation, and geography-based segmentation of sites. Already selective audiences may exercise more control through clicks. Traditional media theorists will recognize the application of cognitive learning theories to the new questions raised by Internet uses.The significance of behavior change in media use is that the old questions about properly functioning democracy remain with the new context (p. 145):The mass public model clearly defines political communication as a top-down process where the elites control information, and the public can, at best, choose whether to receive or ignore incoming messages. This model is heavily influenced by the dominance of the traditional media. . . . Changes in the media system have corresponded with changes in opportunities for audiences. These changes, in turn, cause concern for the continued validity of the mass public. It is therefore important to consider alternative models. (p. 149)It is not until chapter 8, Information Democratization, that Tewksbury and Rittenberg elaborate on the explicit locations of change-YouTube, Hulu, Comedy Central, and other video sites (p. …