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Despite both scholarly and popular claims that citizen journalism (CJ) represents a growing democratizing force in the journalistic field, recent scholarship in the area has noted the decline of the organizational population of CJ. In this paper, we investigate how individual characteristics of sites and the dynamics of larger organizational population affect a CJ site’s risk of experiencing a mortality. Drawing on the largest sample to date of US-based English-language CJ sites, this study examines the risk of site mortality through an event history framework. Findings indicate that the strongest predictor of a site’s mortality is the age of the site, consistent with organizational population theory’s ‘liability of newness.’ We also find that for-profit and community-based sites have lower rates of site mortality, indicating that adopting legitimate conventions of journalism may serve as a protective buffer to site death. The results offer mixed evidence on whether CJ has become more professionalized via attrition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study examines online news framing of a group rape occurring in a Liberian refugee community in Phoenix, Arizona, where four boys sexually assaulted an eight-year-old girl. Specifically, the paper analyzes how the website of the Phoenix-based Arizona Republic newspaper, azcentral.com, constructed the assault and its aftermath, focusing on what framing suggested about the causes of the crime and the role of identity discourses about gender, class, race, nation, and age. Findings suggest two dominant frames that blame the crime and its aftermath on Liberian culture by mobilizing identity discourse to construct youthful male Liberian refugees as violent “others,” and by suggesting that gang rape and victim-blaming are alien to American culture. A less prevalent frame counters the cultural explanation, pointing instead to individual responsibility. To some extent, dominant framing implicates social structures as a cause of rape, but overemphasizes race and nation to mask how they intersect with gender and age, thereby constructing the story in ways that support public anxiety about refugees more than progressive reforms to alleviate gender violence. The conclusions suggest that the frames identified follow established patterns for news constructions of gender violence involving young perpetrators of color. Thus, the study adds a new dimension to recent research likening online newspapers to their print predecessors in ways that reveal a cautious approach to the embrace of the innovative possibilities of internet-based news. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines how mainstream journalists who microblog negotiate their professional norms and practices in a new media format that directly challenges them. Through a content analysis of more than 22,000 of their tweets (postings) on the microblog platform Twitter, this study reveals that the journalists more freely express opinions, a common microblogging practice but one which contests the journalistic norm of objectivity (impartiality and nonpartisanship). To a lesser extent, the journalists also adopted two other norm-related microblogging features: providing accountability and transparency regarding how they conduct their work, and sharing user-generated content with their followers. The journalists working for national newspapers, national television news divisions, and cable news networks were less inclined in their tweets than their counterparts working for less “elite” news outlets, to relinquish their gatekeeping role by sharing their stage with other news gatherers and commentators, or to provide accountability and transparency by providing information about their jobs, engaging in discussions with other tweeters, writing about their personal lives, or linking to external websites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]