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The article reflects on contemporary processes of de-professionalisation of journalism, its consequences for democratic processes and challenges to citizen journalism. It is argued that both the dilemmas of mainstream journalism and the emergence of citizen journalism are consequences of an array of evolving factors having to do with complex transformations in the media landscape and its industries, professional and ‘leisured’ content creation, employment and technologies, shifting patterns of media use among citizens, as well as broader permutations in social and cultural patterns. In the first section, we briefly address the long-term historical decline of professional journalism; in the second section, we look at some of the attributes of the current crisis; in the third section, we probe some of the key features of what has come to be called citizen journalism, a development that is contradictorily entwined with both the de-professionalisation and the democratisation of journalism. In the conclusion, we turn our eye to some paths for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses discourse on benefit fraud in Swedish and British newspapers. It furthermore compares discourse on fraud in newspapers and political blogs in the two countries. In Sweden, fraud is primarily articulated as a collective social problem in policy discussions related to the health insurance programme. In the UK, it is often articulated employing strategies commonly associated with crime news narratives, and centred on images of individual cheaters. The main result of the analysis presented here is that these observed differences between British and Swedish media representations are related to the ways in which the relationship between the welfare state and the citizens traditionally have been constructed in liberal and social democratic contexts respectively. Political attempts to highlight the issue of benefit fraud, and dominant media representations of such attempts, must therefore be understood not as attempts to combat fraud, but rather as attempts to delegitimize the more general aim and purpose of the welfare state. They challenge the deservingness of welfare recipients in general, not just the ones that cheat, and they thereby transform the conditions for public trust in the welfare state. News discourse on fraud in both countries establishes a neoliberal, financialized and individualized notion of welfare dependency, through which the relationship between social and structural circumstances on the one hand, and poverty, exclusion and inequality on the other, become blurred. The comparison of newspapers and blogs suggests that although dominant media representations are contested through citizen-created journalism in both contexts, they also limit the conditions for discursive struggles over the issue of benefit fraud significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]