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Today, citizen photojournalists armed with mobile phones can perform many of the tasks of a photojournalist, calling into question whether photojournalists perform a unique and essential service–characteristics of professionals. Photojournalists defend their professionalism through their professional values and skills, but even as they attempt to defend their occupational turf, the resource-poor news organizations for which they work are soliciting and publishing these citizen-shot news images. This study uses a field experiment that manipulates a photo credit line and open-ended responses to assess whether this sense of threatened professionalism exists. Further, this study examines whether citizen photojournalists' assessment of news image quality is impacted by the presence of a professional credit line. This study adds to the current understanding of photojournalism values, citizen-photojournalism values and professional threat [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]