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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]

Scholars, journalists, and laypeople alike have argued that the relatively new field of citizen journalism (CJ) offers a space where citizens can act as amateur reporters to challenge the dominance of mainstream media. However, contrary to popular expectations, a large number of CJ sites include current or former professional journalists as contributors, calling into question the new field's independence from the mainstream media. Using a content analysis of a sample (n = 326) drawn from the largest sampling frame of English-language CJ websites based in the United States to date (n = 1958), we explore potential explanations for the presence of professional journalists as contributors on CJ sites. In a series of logistic regression analyses, we find evidence that for-profit CJ sites and those with editorial staffs are more likely to have professional journalists. Furthermore, we find that sites with professional journalists do not offer significantly different content when controlling for other factors. Based on these findings, we theorize that CJ websites seek out professional journalists as a means of gaining legitimacy within a new organizational field. These results indicate a growing professionalization within the field of CJ and the persistence of a public sphere dominated by elite actors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]