Citizen Journalism « share2shine

Empowering Web Users: Citizen Journalism News Websites

October 9, 2009

Empowering Users: A Comparative Study of Citizen Journalism News Websites

Conceptually, media practitioners have different perceptions and expectations of citizen journalism in different countries. Empirically, what citizen journalism should be and do can also differ from what it actually is and does in different societies. To map such differences, this study is to investigate a number of selected leading citizen journalism news websites. With different geographical representations in the world, they can differ in many fashions. Within its scope, this study will look into citizen empowerment only, the essence of citizen journalism. In the age of Web 2.0, citizens can be empowered through use of a wealth of web features. Previous studies have identified a list of 24 empowerment features to be used on the homepage and 18 empowerment features to be employed on the story page. And these features constitute coding items for feature analysis. Using each homepage and a selected story page as unit of analysis, this study will code these citizen journalism news websites to map and measure differences in citizen empowerment. In addition, this study will also investigate what citizen journalism news websites publish in comparison with mainstream news websites. And the results of the empirical study will be further measured against different normative notions of what citizen journalism should be and do in society, which are upheld by citizen journalists of the citizen journalism news websites. Besides measuring the normative and empirical gap in citizen journalism, this study will also look into possible factors that have shaped normative-empirical differences so as to pave the way for further efforts in theorizing differences in citizen journalism.

Questions:

RQ1: What are the similarities among citizen journalism websites in empowering citizens?

RQ2: What are the differences among them in empowering citizens?

RQ3: Why are they different in terms of citizen empowerment?

Methods:

Time frame: one day

Subjects: Citizen journalism websites

Unit of Analysis: homepage and story page

A comparative analysis of empowerment indicators

A comparative content analysis of citizen journalism news websites

An in-depth interview of citizen journalists

Resources: