Citizen Media Research Articles

From Blog to Facebook Your Voice Matter? An Insight into the Surge of Citizen Media in Vietnam

London July 2005 - On the first day after the tragic bombing in the city, over 1,000 images and 20 videos were sent into the newsroom of BBC. Featured on the front pages of several mayor newspapers was an iconic image by Alexander Chadwick, a survivor who photographed the chaotic scene in the London underground. The growth of user-generated content from this tragedy, as noted by Jeff Borenstein (2009), marked “a watershed moment” in the journalism industry: passive victims of a terrorist action became participants in the news making process. Hanoi October 2013 - Vo Nguyen Giap, Vietnam's legendary general who masterminded victories against France and the US, has died in Hanoi. The news of his death broke on social media sites on Friday evening and the landmark event was quickly followed by the country's swelling ranks of Internet users. Facebook, the most popular social media platform in Vietnam was erupted into tributes and condolences since Friday after users heard of the military strategist's death. The above examples are only two among hundreds of similar events that we are seeing every day. Across much of the world, thanks to the development of communication technologies especially the Internet, the one-way interaction between readers and news-makers has been ruptured; who and what constitutes the news has considerably changed, particularly in the emerging public zones of the blogosphere and social media. This phenomenon of consumers increasingly participating in the process of making and circulating media leads to a remarkable change in how media is made and consumed; how the meaning of media text and the status of professional journalistic labor is now conceived. During the last few years in Vietnam, social media have risen as an important source of information besides state-controlled media and played an important role in defining and promoting new forms of citizen media in the country. However this is still a fairly new concept in Vietnam and there is little literature written about this phenomenon in the country. Therefore, my aim is to conduct an exploratory research into this field, to provide a preliminary insight into the surge of citizen media in Vietnam. In this paper, after reviewing theoretical background of media and citizenry especially citizen media, I analyze recent developments in the blogging movement and Facebook with a focus on their role in promoting citizen journalism as well as re-shaping the country's media landscape. Specifically, I would like to explore “what are the main contributions of social media (blogs and Facebook) in Vietnam?” and from that to find out “how can citizen journalism in Vietnam progressively integrate itself into today's differentiated media ecology?” In order to answer the key questions, I apply mainly qualitative method as primary sources and related material as secondary sources. A short survey of ten questions has been sent to 100 young Vietnamese people age 18-35. I also carried out deeper interviews with three young people currently living in the cities that have better access to the Internet and also account for the majority of bloggers and social network users in Vietnam. From my research, it shows that social media in Vietnam has seen a spectacular rise in the last few years, which made certain changes to the country's media landscape and to some extent helped facilitate various forms of citizen led initiatives. One of the key contributions of blogs and Facebook in the country is to promote grassroots reporting of “untouched” issues and to provide alternative viewpoints from state-controlled official media outlets. This new genre of media has progressively integrated itself into today's differentiated media ecology of the country, inspiring people to learn, debate and participate further in political discourse. Opening further opportunities for political discussion among citizen, the rise of citizen journalism in Vietnam has contributed to facilitating and sustaining a healthy democratization process. Thus, we see the capacity of social media to bolster critical discussions on public affairs among different groups of the public. However, the facts that both mainstream media and social media in Vietnam still being under rather tight control directly and indirectly from the state, and the narrowing impact of citizen journalism only within a small group of young, urban Internet users remind us that heading to a democratic media is never an easy and overnight story. In the years to come, press freedom, digital divide, media literacy is still complex questions for each and all of us....

Joining Zone 9

Joining Zone 9

Follow-Up Communication In The Blogosphere

This study examines how bloggers link to and comment on news content and selected participatory sources. The extent of follow-up communication is explored through the analysis of the number of blog posts linking to topic-specific professional and citizen media content. In addition, the underlying network structure resulting from the bloggers’ linking behaviour as well as their interconnectedness is determined. Do bloggers refer to a broad range of viewpoints and do they evaluate and comment on linked material? It is contested whether actors participating in networked publics commonly match these standards. The underlying question is whether these media-related contributions lead to an effective and collaborative form of filtering which may help to reduce fragmentation risks. Through a combined content and network analysis of 323 blogs, this study reveals that bloggers primarily give attention to a limited and less diverse selection of articles on a given topic basis. All blogs in the sample were investigated in 2007 and revisited in 2010. They show a link connection to at least one of 545 articles from a major professional and a citizen media website in Germany. The research design allows a complete comparison of the media coverage and their reactions within blog posts.

Mass media and public education: The effects of access to community radio in Benin

Prior research on mass media and government accountability has not examined the effects of citizen media access on broad public services, such as education. At the same time, research has abstracted from the potentially influential role of mass media on parental investments in children's education. We address both issues using a “natural experiment” in radio access in Benin and find that school children's literacy rates are higher in villages exposed to a larger number of community radio stations. There is no evidence that this effect operates through greater government responsiveness. Instead, households with greater media access make larger private investments in their children's education.

A PASSAGEM DA TOCHA OLÍMPICA: Ativação de Discursos Cidadãos-Consumidores

O artigo começa com uma discussão sobre a evolução da passagem da tocha Olímpica, que culminou com os Jogos Olímpicos de Londres em 2012. A isto segue-se uma análise do poder empresarial e político que envolve os Jogos Olímpicos. Aqui, os valores do movimento Olímpico são contrastados com os movimentos dirigidos ao brandscaping das cidades-anfitriãs e das nações obrigadas pelos acordos contratuais estabelecidos, assim que lhes são garantidos os direitos de serem anfitriãs dos Jogos Olímpicos. Empiricamente, o artigo centra-se na parte escocesa da passagem da tocha Olímpica, um "evento" móvel que viajou pelo Reino Unido no verão de 2012. Através das lentes do projeto de investigação-ação #citizenrelay, a passagem da tocha olímpica é aberta ao escrutínio como um veículo para a ativação de marca, garantida e protegida pelo estado local a um custo significativo para as comunidades pelo país. Antes de tirar conclusões, discute-se o papel dos média cidadãos, que permitem comentários lúdicos, irónicos e, às vezes, provocativos sobre a extravagância dos Jogos Olímpicos. O artigo conclui argumentando que a passagem da tocha Olímpica promove a manifestação do espírito dos Jogos Olímpicos (a paz, a harmonia e a amizade), ao mesmo tempo que usa o seu alcance e popularidade para estender os tentáculos do brandscaping para edifícios, paisagens e espaços anteriormente protegidos contra os caprichos da mercantilização. As experiências concebidas institucionalmente são coreografadas para o benefício dos média nacionais e internacionais, deixando os cidadãos como espectadores passivos, que desempenham os papéis pré-concebidos de abanadores de bandeiras e apoiantes roucos de patrocinadores corporativos. No entanto, também sublinhamos a incompletude do nexo média-corporativo e enfatizamos o potencial dos média cidadãos para subverter as representações estabelecidas, permitindo um espaço participativo onde os média podem ser criados e distribuídos amplamente, em vez de consumidos passivamente. A normalização das relações de poder existentes entre os megaeventos desportivos e o comércio poderá ser ameaçada pelo peso de histórias produzidas localmente, digitalmente conectadas e compartilháveis.

Digital cultures, acceleration and mega sporting event narratives

Mega sporting events, as with the evolution of human progress, continue to be marked by trepidation and awe over the transformational power of technology. Today, mega sporting events like the Olympic Games and World Cup are increasingly the captivating spectacles of consumer capitalism. Whereas, since the 1980s, established media organisations have exerted a significant influence over the production of mega sporting event narratives, the mass availability of everyday digital technologies democratises media making, changing the way events are conceived, planned, mediatised and reported. Citizens, living digitised and social mediated lifestyles, are now important co-creators, shaping the design, delivery and dissemination of events to a wider audience. This article explores the emergence of digital tools and technologies and their impact on mega sporting event media narratives. It highlights how social media and ubiquitous digital technologies augment accelerated identities. As a means of illustrating the acceleration agenda and its impact on mega sporting event coverage, the author presents a case study of a citizen media initiative #citizenrelay, which focused on the Olympic Torch Relay on its journey around Scotland, UK in the summer of 2012. The article concludes by suggesting that the digitally democratised citizen has power in their pocket to make media that, when brought together as part of a collective, can present alternative narratives to those offered by the established media frame.

Book Review: The Digital Youth Network: Cultivating New Media Citizenship in Urban Communities

Book Review: <i>The Digital Youth Network: Cultivating New Media Citizenship in Urban Communities</i>

Review: Citizens' Media Against Armed Conflict: Disrupting Violence in Colombia - by C. Rodríguez

For nearly four decades, Colombian citizens have lived with violence between the military, paramilitary, and guerilla groups. Men go to work afraid of being stopped on the street, and women live in fear of their husbands or sons dying in the violence. Children attend school and learn in the violence that surrounds them. It is within the context of constant overt and sublevel violence that Clemencia Rodríguez positions her study of citizens' media. Rodríguez analyzes citizens' media in three cities within warring Colombia, and how citizen's media helps citizens to negotiate the mental and social effects of such sustained violence. Through a close analysis of the communities' response and involvement in citizens' media, Rodríguez is able to demonstrate that citizens' media—rather than media as government watchdog or news purveyor—is able to effectively combat the negative impacts of relentless violence such as mistrust, fear, and reclusiveness. It does so by creating a space for people to come together not as enemies or strangers, but rather as neighbors. Additionally, by focusing their media endeavors on the community rather than on the violence, citizens' media takes power away from the negative effects of violence and gives it to the community in the form of shared experience.

Watching From Afar

Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of Arab Spring–related content using a unique data set constructed by combining archived Twitter content with metadata drawn from the URL shortening service Bit.ly. This data set allows us to explore two critical research questions: First, were links posted to Twitter (among other platforms) followed primarily by individuals inside the affected country, within the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region or by those outside the region and country? And second, who attracted more attention online: protesters and other nonelite citizens or traditional news organizations? Our findings suggest that the vast majority of attention to Arab Spring content came from outside of the MENA region and, furthermore, that mass media, rather than citizen media, overwhelmingly held the world’s attention during the protests. We thus conclude that Twitter was broadly useful as an information channel for non-MENA onlookers but less so for protesters on the ground.

Book Review: Amateur Images and Global News

Amateur Images and Global News. Kari Anden-Papadopoulos and Mervi Pantti, eds. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2011. 213 pp. $40 pbk.It is easy to get caught up in the idea that the Internet has changed everything. Despite regularly assigning my History of Journalism students Michael Schudson's 1997 JMCQ article, Toward a Troubleshooting Manual for Journalism History, I still occasionally find myself unconsciously arguing for the technological determinism of the Internet and, increasingly, smartphones.But I think I've turned the corner after reading the engaging Amateur Images and Global News, edited by Kari Anden-Papadopoulos and Mervi Pantti. Anden- Papadopoulos is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication at Stockholm University, and Pantti is an associate professor in the Department of Social Research, Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki. Their carefully selected chapters historicize and contextualize the use and circulation of amateur photographs in a nuanced way that ultimately leads to more provocative questions not about how the Internet has supported amateur photographers, but about how the web has changed and will continue to change the distribution and meaning of amateur and professional photographers alike.The book begins with three chapters exploring the historical use of amateur photographs in the pre-Internet, pre-video era. For example, in chapter 1, Karin Becker describes how private family photos of Titanic victims were incorporated into mainstream newspapers. Then Stuart Allan describes the early history of war reporting in a chapter that will become required reading the next time I teach journalism history. Allan's contribution, paired with Liam Kennedy's later chapter on the distribution of personal photos by soldiers in the war in Iraq, highlights that although pocket cameras have been marketed to soldiers since World War I, authorship is now more transparent and mechanisms of distribution and publication are more diverse.Part II of the book, which includes a chapter by the editors on the incorporation of citizen footage of Iran's Green Movement in the international press, presents a series of case studies on how various news organizations organize and describe amateur photographs and videos. Here the establishment of journalistic authority is expressed vis-a-vis the contributions of eyewitness amateurs, whose pictures may lack the aesthetic quality of professional journalists.Finally, part III includes contributions on the dissemination of citizen media and their interpretation by audiences. We learn that, in general, audiences are more supportive of citizen journalists than the mainstream media. Liina Puustinen and Janne Seppanen conclude in chapter 10 that audience reading of user-generated content as more authentic reflects a more profound cultural condition in which authenticity works as a part of late modern life politics. …

Revolutionary Media on a Budget: Facebook-only Social Journalism

The latest wave of revolutions that has swept the Arab world and Egypt has given rise to new forms of citizen journalism that have met the pressing need for instantaneous updates on protests as well as filled the gap left by traditional news agencies targeted by oppressive regimes. This form of citizen media is characterized by using amateur yet innovative forms of journalism. It operates on a low budget and utilizes social media as a platform and network builder. This paper analyzes this phenomenon by examining the case of the Facebook-launched Rassd News Network in Egypt, a citizen journalist network that had the largest audience base during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. The paper conducts a qualitative textual analysis of the discourse utilized by Rassd during the onset of the revolution guided by Gamson’s collective action frames. It also discusses the reasons behind the network’s success as well as the challenges that such initiatives face, including their ability to survive competition with bigger, wealthier, and more credible news agencies.

Information Literacy in the Study of American Politics: Using New Media to Teach Information Literacy in the Political Science Classroom

Students have access to a vast amount of information about American politics through new media outlets (e.g., the Internet). We survey the perils and promise of this new landscape through a case study of a political science class at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York (CUNY), that examined congressional races in the 2010 election season. We find that students have access to a diversity of information and opinion about House of Representative races that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. However, the students’ information literacy skills and the ability of students to sort and weigh the value of various perspectives to inform their own conclusions was limited. Unlike much of the celebratory tone of studies that proclaim the emancipatory value of new media for citizens and students alike, we argue that educators interested in the potential of new media must devote considerable attention to both the variety and reliability of new media outlets, as well as provide the historical and political context for information that students gather, with the goal of developing a deeper form of information literacy for students. New media offers much potential, but great challenges to educators as well.

The Globalization of the Pavement

Abstract This article investigates examples of citizen media production and communication (blogs and social media sites in Tanzania and its diasporas) in the immediate aftermath of the Gongo la Mboto blasts in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, February 2011. At the centre is the relationship between media use and communication practices of the pavement - drawing from the notion of pavement radio - and the spaceship, i.e. a metaphor for traditional mass media, exemplified by policies and practices of the BBC and its World Service. We argue that new social media practices as digital pavement radio are converging with traditional forms of street buzz and media use. Forms of oral communication are adapting towards the digital and filling information voids in an informal economy of news and stories in which media practices are stimulated by already ingrained traditions. An existing oral culture is paving the way for a globalization of the pavement.

From Blogging Central Asia to Citizen Media: A Practitioners’ Perspective on the Evolution of the neweurasia Blog Project

This essay examines the development of one regional blogosphere, the Central Asian ‘Stanosphere’, through a focus on the neweurasia blog project. The neweurasia project began in 2005 as an English-language volunteer-run blog project about the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus, rapidly becoming one of the most visited blogs about the region. Following this auspicious start, over the next five years neweurasia developed into a multi-language locally driven project with more than 80,000 unique page views on average per month. Despite its indisputable successes, the project was often a steep learning curve for all involved. In this essay, we examine neweurasia's evolution from ‘blogging Central Asia’ towards a citizen media project, and reflect on some of the issues and challenges encountered. On the basis of our discussion, we reflect upon how neweurasia, and citizen media in general, can maximise its impact on the nascent Stanosphere, in the process helping to give Central Asia a voice in the global blogosphere.

Image, Space, Revolution: The Arts of Occupation

Image, Space, Revolution: The Arts of Occupation

Collaborative efforts: An exploratory study of citizen media in China

In the field of citizen media research, considerably less attention has been paid to countries other than the US and those in Western Europe. This article is a case study that focuses on citizen media in Beijing – specifically, the Dazhalan Project. Combining in-depth interviews and textual analysis, the article demonstrates the uniqueness of citizen media under China’s state-party media system. The article also suggests that it was the collaboration among ordinary citizens, professionals and journalists that made it possible for citizen media to influence the mainstream media frame-building process.

Micro-blogging as a Rapid Response News Service in Crisis Reporting: the 2011 Wenzhou Train Crash

This paper studies the role of Sina Weibo (a Chinese equivalent to Twitter) in disseminating vital information among the general public after the Wenzhou train crash in July 2011. Consuming low bandwidth while being capable of broadcast, information sent via micro-blogging can be quickly disseminated among a large population and provide first-hand accounts of the disaster. Micro-blogging seems therefore an ideal tool in the case of emergency news dissemination. Meanwhile, Weibo’s social network nature enabled information sent via Weibo to be used in pleas for help, in searching for dislocated people, and in the coordination of rescue efforts, as well as in voluntary activities. During the Wenzhou train crash, due the political nature of the incident, Weibo was also used as a platform for channelling public opinion, and it featured criticism of the official rescue efforts. This paper argues that Weibo’s strength in crisis communication lies in its real-time streaming of facts, perspectives and opinions, and in its reach. In this sense, Weibo adds new dimensions to the understanding of Web 2.0 technologies in emergency communication and shows potential for redistributing power among the government, the officially controlled news media, and citizen media.

Safety vs credibility: West Papua Media and the challenge of protecting sources in dangerous places

West Papua Media (WPM) is an innovative media outlet established in 2007 in response to the ongoing human rights crisis in the Indonesian provinces that self-identify as West Papua. The context of its establishment included rising hope about the potential of citizen media to empower repressed publics, complaints from mainstream media about the difficulty of establishing the credibility of reports emerging from the provinces, a ban on foreign media, and political moves by Australia to prioritise its relationship with the Indonesian government over demanding an end to oppressive military behaviour in West Papua. This article documents the strategies WPM has pioneered to bolster its credibility and protect its journalists and sources who work and live in an oppressive context. It also contextualises these strategies in relation to standard journalism processes (Lamble, 2004, 2011); current best practice about the protection of journalists in conflict zones (Cramer, 2009); and emerging concepts of global journalism ethics (Ward, 2010).

Citizens' Relationships with a Municipality and Their Communicative Behaviors in Negative Civic Issues

A Web survey involving 293 citizens in Siena, Italy, revealed how perceived relationship quality with a municipality and prior experiences of residence can create strategic value for local governments. In particular, the quality of relations with citizens makes these holders of good relationships view civic problems as less problematic, although the problems impact residents' interests. Implications for public relations research and practices are discussed, as well as the specific role played by digital and social media in citizens' active communication behaviors related to negative civic issues.

Content analysis: Absence of journalistic standards in citizen media

The contribution of citizens to media contents is here to stay. Phenomena like Facebook, blogs and Twitter have opened space for the public and have enriched the debates on socially significant issues. The advent of digital media with content partially or fully produced by those who previously were public or, eventually, sources, has sometimes suggested the possibility of a replacement of journalism. This article confirms, through a content analysis of media belonging to the Network of Citizen Newspapers of Chile, that units developed by citizens do not meet the criteria of Journalistic Added Value (JAV). It therefore concludes that the contribution of citizens can benefit and be a complement to the news agenda, but it is far from complying with the professional journalism’s basic standards: selection, prioritization and contextualization of socially relevant contents. Keywords: citizen journalism; journalistic quality; information; citizen media; Web 2.0; produser; freedom of speech; Chile.