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Opportunities offered by information and communication technologies have allowed many people to become political content creators. Usually, the produced content is not based on information made by professionals. The objective of this work is to analyze the relation between the tracking of political information in professional media and the production of political content in non-professional media. The study performs a secondary analysis of the data obtained by applying the statistical method to surveys published by the Spanish Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas between 2011 and 2016. Results show that there is a strong relation between the participation in blogs and forums and the use of the Internet to become informed about politics. It is also observed that there exists an association between the creation of political content and the tracking of programmes about politics on press, radio and television. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interviews with bloggers examine the ongoing use of blogs to cope with the persistent community stress New Orleans has experienced post-Hurricane Katrina. Previously, the field of media studies has overlooked blogs’ coping role. Cyber psychology has explored blogs’ role in individual and emotional coping, but not task-oriented efforts to ameliorate sources of community stress. Among other insights, the unique intersection of media studies and cyber psychology explored in this study illuminates the double-edged sword that is the imagined audience. While a positive source of social support, efforts to attract and maintain an audience can impose the perceived pressure to “keep face” and maintain an angry blogging persona beyond its useful cathartic value. Combining perspectives from cyber psychology and media studies, this study contributes a more multifaceted understanding of how residents may use social media to cope with individual and community stress than has been explored in previous research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the role of citizen journalism in Zimbabwe, focusing specifically on citizens' uses of SMS and web logs to exchange information during the controversial delay in releasing the 2008 general election results. It explores and analyses the various emerging aspects of citizen journalism and how they manifested themselves during this moment of political tension. The paper argues that citizen journalism contributed a great deal to the circulation of public opinion, and to some extent influenced the way mainstream media covered this post-election period. By adding voice to the coverage from mainstream media, this “parallel market” of information contributed to the further exposure of the Mugabe regime's sinister machinations, thereby stopping the potential wholesale theft of the Zimbabwean people's victory in that election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses online journalistic media formats with an emphasis on blogs. It asserts that the Internet has expanded the ways in which people can participate in journalism. Blogs, wikis, online social networks, forums, chat rooms, instant messaging, and news groups represent what has come to be known as social media, the article says. Social media have led to so-called citizen or participatory journalism, in which the power of public communication, circulation of information, and the setting of agendas has been devolved from traditional media entities to citizens, the article adds. Blogs as a journalistic medium are examined in detail.

The article reports on efforts by Steffen Leidel and Elena Ern to improve the quality of content on Latin American blogs and related forms of on-line citizen journalism through "blog re-visto" (www.revisto.de), a project of the German entity Deutsche Welle Akademie. It distinguishes between citizen news gathering and professional journalism, noting that news presented according to journalistic principles carries the highest quality, credibility, and overall value. Finding that Internet connectivity is increasing and improving in Latin America, the article describes the greatest challenge to citizen reporting as ensuring content quality.