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This article examines how WeChat, contemporary China's most popular mobile phone application, is affecting digitally enabled citizen journalism. Based on focus-group research with WeChat users, and building on the insights of previous studies of digitally enabled citizen journalism within and outside of China, we find that WeChat's integration of multiple communicative networks renders it a multiversal space where citizen journalistic practice can bleed across public, semi-public, and private spheres. We show that WeChat offers diverse communicative affordances facilitating practices of "metavoicing" as a form of citizen journalism, blurring divides between news production and consumption. This dynamic affects users' experiences of news and can influence news agendas story lifecycles. WeChat also faces important limitations as a citizen journalism platform: it is a space where political discussion can be readily reported, where the tone of current affairs coverage is often sensationalized, and where the reliability of content can be difficult to discern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared to its Western counterpart, China's media culture has its uniqueness. The relationship between Chinese media and media users presents 'Chinese style' characteristics, especially with the rise of participatory journalism online. Based on critical reflections on the agenda-setting theory and existing research work on participatory journalism, this essay proposes three models of participatory journalism in the Chinese context. Depending on the interaction between media agenda and audience agenda, the three models are as follows: (1) the incompatible model, (2) the negotiatory model, and (3) the unconventional model. This essay aims to use these three models to demonstrate the notion of 'journalism as process' proposed by Robinson and the significance of the socialization and politicization of audience understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using China’s Red Cross scandal as a central case, this study examines the interaction between Chinese mainstream media and media users on China’s Internet in the course of the event. This study reflects on how the participation of Chinese netizens impacted Chinese mainstream media in the digital age, how Chinese mainstream media responded, and how the interplay between the media and media users affected the trajectory of the event. The Red Cross case indicates that in today’s China, the boundary between the political domain and the entertainment domain is fluid. The two domains have different functions and implications. The specific case discussed in this paper traveled back and forth between the two domains depending on the power dynamic between the media, media users, and the larger social, political context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]