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Mobile technology is part and parcel of the news today, perhaps to such a degree that it is hard to imagine news without it. This technology has affected those platforms on which news is being produced, for example, but also the array of actors that are involved in its manufacturing through mobile technology, thereby illustrating news as an ongoing information construction process in which professionals and other participants join hands. Stemming from a socio-technical emphasis in journalism this paper addresses the interplay between mobile news technology and social actors by focusing on three leading Israeli WhatsApp news groups ("People of Silence", "Field Security" and "Reports from the Ground") and the daily supply of materials delivered via these groups from their participating members. Based on a thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with the groups' founders, supported by the groups' materials and messages data, findings show how these groups perform as unique pseudo-professional news groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social networks are becoming a site of unprecedented diffusion of fake news and misinformation in Morocco. This fact does not only affect people as individuals but also undermines social order and cohesion in general. To fight back, a number of journalists and researchers have engaged in fact-checking processes to verify claims and information. In this regard, this study considers fact-checking as an emerging journalistic brand that has the potential to promote healthier public debate in the contemporary media environment in Morocco. For this reason, a qualitative approach is adopted to explore the nature of a group of Moroccan online fact checkers to understand their motivations, practices, process of production, and the impact they have made in the public sphere. The significance of this research resides in the fact that it tracks a trend in Moroccan media landscape and investigates its importance in creating communities of interest. Also, exploring this new online trend will help in providing a different perspective on the richness and diversity of content, and change how people think about the online media environment in Morocco. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the case of La Gordiloca, a Facebook-based journalist from Laredo, TX, to interrogate the increasing role of social media within news-making processes. Applauded by The New York Times as a paragon of twenty-first century journalism and under scrutiny from local businesses and law enforcement for defamation and misuse of official information, she occupies a space between digital journalist and social media celebrity. Combining a content analysis with focus groups of Laredo residents, we argue that her work reflects a constitutive paradox unique to social media journalism: Whereas new technologies expand opportunities for citizens to participate in the process of news production, they also enable the corrosion of norms/practices that oriented previous forms of news production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public journalism is viewed by many as a solution to the decreasing media presence and public involvement in regional news media. Core values in this approach are public deliberation, participation, and connectedness. This study investigates the added value of a citizen-centred approach to journalism routines and news content in a collaborative regional media project in the Netherlands. Data were gathered using observations, interviews, and content analyses. Results show that even in a newly created news environment, existing journalistic routines largely prevent incorporation of a bottom-up approach in daily news production. Furthermore, active citizenship does not seem to be common: citizens did not participate readily in news production. While news content shows a greater focus on local communities and citizen sources, citizen sources were overwhelmingly used in vox pops rather than more active roles in which their expertise, experience, or specific knowledge was relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web-based civic participation in democracies, especially in the sprawling domain of alternative politics, continues to grow. In this paper I explore the intersection of two trajectories of such participation: one that takes the form of journalism (broadly understood) and the other that is transnational in character. Participatory journalism unavoidably evokes normative issues that professional journalism has always grappled with. Global activism, in turn, can be analytically framed by the theme of civic cosmopolitanism. My aim is to highlight and juxtapose these two sets of ideals, two normative frameworks for guiding practice in regard to journalism. In the first section I survey the Web environment from the standpoint of its enhanced capacity to enable citizens to engage with their societies and the world. Journalistic activity has become a part of this kind of online engagement, and thus normative issues about these practices quickly arise. In the second section, I sketch some of the relevant contours of cosmopolitanism, underscoring the normative themes that it raises. The final section comprises an interface with horizons of civic cosmopolitanism and those of a dilemma-ridden professional journalism; I try to pull the strands together by elucidating the implications that ensue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper provides a review of research on user generated content in the Israeli online journalism landscape. Findings reveal that scholarly attention has been focused primarily on user comments, with initial insight on the role of blogs and citizen journalism in the Israeli journalism landscape. Methodologically, research is derived primarily from interviews with newsroom staff and case study content analyses. The review suggests that future research should complement current data with user based inquiry about orientations and use of UGC, and examine the role of Israeli culture in the practice of UGC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research about online journalism has been dominated by a discourse of technological innovation. The 'success' of online journalism is often measured by the extent to which it utilizes technological assets like interactivity, multimedia and hypertext. This paper critically examines the technologically oriented research about online journalism in the second decade of its existence. The aim is twofold. First, to investigate to what degree online journalism, as it is portrayed in empirical research, utilizes new technology more than previously. Second, the paper points to the limitations of technologically oriented research and suggests alternative research approaches that might be more effective in explaining why online journalism develops as it does. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note begins by pointing to the forms of geographical and political enclosure that have resulted from the current Sri Lankan government's effective regulation of parts of the national media, as well as its mediation of knowledge produced about Sri Lanka more generally. It argues that a rather draconian and unbreachable geography of inside and outside is instantiated by the political regime's insularizing regulation of the country's media(tion). The research note then points to new virtual spaces in the Sri Lankan context that are reconfiguring this sticky geography of inside and outside. In particular, it argues that Sri Lanka's burgeoning blogosphere and online citizen journalism provide new, participatory spaces for dissent, debate and the free flow of information that have much potential to assist in the production of a more robust and critical civil society. The emergence of these spaces points to the importance of geography and spatiality in manufacturing an effective critical politics in contemporary Sri Lanka. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A systematic study of day-to-day practices of citizen reporters, compared to their mainstream counterparts, suggests that ordinary citizens can serve as a vital complement to mainstream journalism, however not as its substitute. The paper develops a version of the “news access” theory, which sees citizen journalists as hindered by their inferior access to news sources, unlike mainstream journalism, where the problem is seen as the superior access of some of their sources to extensive and favored coverage. There are several symptoms for citizen reporters' limited news access: their modest use of human sources; the high proportion of one-source items; their reluctance to interactively negotiate versions with sources; and their contacts with sources tend to be ad hoc exchanges, rather than long-term role relationships. On the other hand, citizen reporters have adopted several mechanisms that help them make up for their comparably limited access. They are much more likely to pursue stories at their own initiative. They tend to predicate their stories on firsthand witnessing, technical sources (mainly Internet), personal acquaintances, and on their own experience. Data were gleaned from a series of interviews in which reporters from Israeli citizen and mainstream news websites explained how they formulated their sampled items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizen participation in online political debate and the Internet's effect on Chinese society have become an important research field. However, few studies so far have examined the use of interactive functions by Chinese newspaper websites to facilitate online discussion of civil issues, or the quality of public debate on the websites of Chinese online newspapers. Using the concept of the public sphere as its theoretical framework, this article aims to advance this line of inquiry through content analysis of the Guangzhou Daily website—Dayoo.com—to explore both the potential and the limits of the Internet in fostering civic engagement. Key variables measured include the quantity of posts and participants, topicality, nature of the argument (i.e. justification, complexity and civility), and responsiveness and homogeneity of contributions. Findings suggest that a political public sphere in Chinese cyberspace is emerging at the incipient stage, where the quality of discourse has reached a certain level but is not yet mature in terms of the complexity of dialogue and the exposure to disagreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the new forms of audience participation in journalism with regard to their possibility in achieving the goals of public journalism.2 A typology of five models of audience connections is proposed: (1) traditional journalism, (2) public journalism, (3) interactive journalism, (4) participatory journalism, and (5) citizen journalism. Identifying the higher goal of public journalism as engaging the people as citizens and helping public deliberation, I argue that the new forms of audience participation could further these goals only by infusing the value from and learning the techniques of public journalism. The concept of community, of public deliberation, past research on the Internet, and data obtained from my field study is drawn upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]