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The second generation of web tools shook the journalist profession approximately two decades ago with the proactive incorporation of audiences into the media. Citizen journalism and user-generated content arose as an object of interest due to the democratising value of participation attributed to them, with empowered citizens who could emulate the professional and institutional practises of journalists. However, difficulties soon came to the surface, and audience participation in news media began to be limited. Within this context, this article conducts a critical review of studies on audience participation in news media based on a systematic literature review. The results indicate that, in general, audiences showed low interest in the creation of informative content and that their participation has grown increasingly problematic. In addition, journalists are reticent as they defend their professional role above all else, while company strategies have prioritised making participation profitable. For this reason, the idea of citizen journalism that offers user-created content through the media appears to be a thing of the past, with many characteristics that could define it as a failed innovation. Therefore, the text concludes that audience participation in the media could be defined as mediatised participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizen journalism is growing very rapidly, along with many media that use citizen journalism as a source of news and information. In addition to mass media, citizen journalism uses social media as a platform to receive and disseminate new information. The @pulau.enggano account is an account that uses citizen journalism as a source of information. This study aims to analyze the role of citizen journalism in generating information about @pulau.enggano accounts using a qualitative descriptive paradigm based on postpositivism. Data collection techniques were conducted by conducting in-depth interviews and observations of two key informants and five informants. The theory used in this study is Tony Rodgers' theory of the role and concept of citizen journalism initiation. This research found that the role of citizen journalism is very important to provide information about tourism on Enggano Island on the @pula.enggano Instagram account because it can help the team to get information easily, quickly and in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As in almost every part of the world, the issue of "Public Space" and "Private Space" is constantly discussed in our country. This situation is also frequently discussed in the media. This issue, which was also discussed in the traditional media (newspapers, radio and television), has been further fuelled by the emergence of the "Internet", which we call New Media, the addition of Social Media in the following years and the emergence of "Citizen Journalism" in recent years. In recent years, 'Drone Journalism' has also been added to these debates, which have been brought to the judiciary from time to time. While many news agencies and media organisations use drones to report news, Citizen Journalists also use drones to film everything and use it on their social media sites. In addition to these, some Communication faculties in our country have also opened a "Drone Journalism" Department. The "Public Space, Private Space" debate, which has been going on for many years and which has become insurmountable, has turned into an insurmountable situation, namely "Violation of Privacy" with "Drone Journalism". In addition to some benefits and conveniences that Drone Journalism provides to the media, it is often seen that it violates private life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As more journalists rely on social media platforms like Twitter to gather information and report the news, scholars have identified an increasing tension between traditional journalistic values and reporters' construction of online personas. Moreover, networked journalists build these mediated personas—following platforms' affordances—to better engage with fellow journalists and algorithmic audiences. Drawing on data from 15 in-depth interviews with Kosovar Albanian political journalists and editors, this article offers a unique perspective by examining the negotiation process between professional standards and journalists' online personas on Twitter. Via their online personas, influenced by the audience and the platforms' affordances and logic, journalists and editors have given rise to new role conceptions and standards in local political journalism. The results show that political journalists and editors in Kosovo view Twitter as a platform where they can display both professional and personal layers of their identity. Furthermore, they feel unrestricted by journalistic standards, taking on roles outside the traditional scope of journalism: as good citizens, they express opinions on political issues; as activists, they advocate for personally meaningful causes; but they also see themselves as mordant critics of political figures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advancement in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are revolutionizing Development Journalism (DJ) into an effective strategy for building competitive economies globally. However, many countries in Africa including Tanzania are slow in tapping potentials of ICT for development journalism. Digital penetration in the form of the Internet and social media are changing the way in which journalists are mobilizing and engaging communities in journalism practises, a key strategy for a competitive digitalised economy. This paper was guided by Development Communication Theory and Diffusion of Innovation Theory to explore the use of online social media by journalists in Tanzania to practice development journalism. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, this paper analyses risks and benefits of online social media platforms in contributing to national development goals. A total of 15 social media journalists and managers from Mwananchi Digital, Ayo TV and Azam TV gave their insights in this paper. Use of online social media platforms for development news is still in its infancy stage, key findings show that out of 270 (100%) studied news items, only 66 (24%) manifested development news practice. Non-development news accounted for 204 (76%) of news items analysed. There were only four (4) (27%) journalists who use social media as a source of information, and platform for disseminating development news in Ayo TV compared to 3 (20%) in Mwananchi Digital and 5 (33%) in Azam TV. Results call upon some intensive national efforts to empower journalists in the use of ICT and mobilize audience in the changing communication patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exploitation of data in the media industry has always played a significant role. This is especially evident today, since data (and in many cases big data) are generated through various activities that relate to the production and also consumption of news. This paper attempts to highlight the importance of big data utilization in the media industry. Specifically, it discusses cases of big data exploitation, such as media content consumption and management, data journalism production, social content utilization, and participatory journalism applications. The study also examines the changes that big data has introduced in all stages of the journalism practice, from news production to news distribution, by utilizing the available tools. Finally, it discusses new developments that relate to semantic web (Web 3.0) technologies, which have already started to be adopted by media organizations around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disinformation has become a core concept in communications research, related to media, technological and political phenomena that complexify its definition and diagnosis. Although its approach has been mainly quantitative, focus groups have also been used to understand the perception of the audience of this particular issue. This research is part of this second group of studies, and attempts to investigate the notions and discourses on disinformation in the case of Spain. For this purpose, seven discussion groups were conducted, with a structural sample constructed according to employment situation, ideology and age. The results show a perception of the communicative ecosystem structured in two chronological poles, which contrasts a past of reduced information supply – associated with traditional media – with a current informational environment where there is more media diversity, but also less trust in them. The groups point to the overabundance of information and associated disinformation with decontextualisation, low-quality journalism and the economic and political interests of different actors. Discourses outline a scenario of decline in journalism and the public sphere, which is perceived as polarised and emotional. Disinformation is therefore perceived as a multidimensional phenomenon that is associated with issues of major democratic transcendence rather than merely sending hoaxes through the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an interdisciplinary field, data-driven journalism integrates the intellectual origins of investigative journalism, computer-assisted reporting, and the emerging paradigm of computational social science. Studies of news production have revealed, however, that news professionals are reinforcing existing power structures via an interpretive community, where homophily-evoked social interactions—even in the social media context—create echo chambers and discussion fragmentation. Is the representation of data-driven journalism in the electronic public sphere breaking boundaries among people from different domains or does it resemble the existing power structure? This study adopts a network analytics approach and constructs a representational network among actors who joined the public discussion of data-driven journalism in the Twittersphere—the co-retweeted network—such that two accounts are connected if their tweets are retweeted by the same user. Public tweets containing search queries related to data-driven journalism published from February 2017 to February 2018 were collected with Twitter real-time streaming application programming interface (API). A co-retweeted network with 1,148 accounts was derived from verified accounts' retweeting posts. Results found that several communities emerged, and news organizations, nongovernmental and nonprofit professional organizations, and academic institutions were in the crucial positions of the network. The exponential random graph models (ERGMs) based on this network revealed the extent to which gender, geographical location, and institutional type of the users were associated with the tie-formation. This study documents the major actors who are discussing the subject of data-driven journalism and raises critical reflections toward the interdisciplinary collaboration in the production of public knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alternative news media in Norway have become visible in public debates. Partly because of news sharing on social media. Social media has become an arena for news, information, and public debate, and has also become a place to fight for the news agenda. The present study examines news sharing in social media in Norway and how right-wing alternative news outlets use social media to impact the news agenda. These are small organizations with only a handful of employees, but they have very proactive readers and feature a considerable amount of user-generated content. They are critical of immigration, particularly from Muslim countries, and of the political elite. They mimic traditional media in the way they organize and label their content, but their reporting is more subjective. The present study uses quantitative content analysis to reveal which topics are the most shared on social media, and from which news type of news organizations they come. It also looks at how news sharing differed in the days following a series of terrorist attacks and how the pattern changed during the course of a normal day. This leads to a discussion on participatory journalism and how news sharing can be seen as a part of the public debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how the moderation of reader comments influences journalism practice. Through in-depth interviews with journalists working at both organizations that perform in-house comment moderation and organizations that employ outside organizations such as Facebook to do moderation, the study aims to illuminate how comments can influence newswork on multiple levels of analysis, all the while decreasing journalistic autonomy. The paper concludes by theorizing how to protect autonomy while still prioritizing community participation. [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]

In response to mass protests in Zimbabwe in January 2019, the government ordered all internet service providers in the country to suspend operations. While Zimbabwe experienced its first total internet shutdown then, the government previously imposed other forms of restrictions to social network platform access, including the removal of a Facebook page of 'whistleblower' Baba Jukwa in 2014. Moreover, the government's 2018 National Policy for Information and Communication Technology initiative promised more centralized state control of the country's internet traffic. These issues and potential realities raise concerns for journalists and storytellers in Zimbabwe. How can they can circumvent censorship online? How does their use of social media complicate conceptualizations of temporality and censorship on the internet? Shortly after the shutdown ended, the Johannesburg Review of Books published a story by a journalist formatted as a Twitter timeline from his 'recollections and imaginings' of what he would have posted during the week-long social media blackout. It included descriptions of protests, statements about the state, and satire aimed at the president, telling the type of stories that the government had attempted to censor. As a vehicle for the piece, the JRB created a new Twitter account, @Zvakadhakwa, for the tweets. This paper explores notions of risk, transparency, and opacity in journalism, and storytelling under surveillance and digital censorship in Zimbabwe, by engaging with scholarship on Baba Jukwa Facebook posts before the internet shutdown in Zimbabwe and deploying a close textual analysis of the alternate Twitter timeline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of information communication technologies has transformed communication in Nigeria. The mass media once regarded as the most vocal and vibrant press in Africa is losing public trust as people easily source for critical information from social media instead of the media due to their patrimonial relationship with the state. The potentials of these information communication technologies in holding government accountable and enhancing journalism practice has endangers the state. Consequently, attempts by the state at regulating social media and the mass media through draconian bills such as protection from internet falsehood and manipulation bill of 2019, and the National Communication for the prohibition of Hate Speech bill 2019. Using Habermas notion of the public sphere coupled with semi-structured interviews with 12 media practitioners, this paper examines ways in which such regulatory frameworks have impacted on both the media and democratic cultures of the Nigerian state. The paper argues that social media and its convergence in the newsroom has expounded the democratic culture due to its affordances of speedy and accountability. However, the potentials of social media and its affordance has been misused. Consequently, the contestation between the state, public and media on how social media and its convergence in the newsroom can be effectively regulated. The media and public do not trust the state as they blame the state for the rise of fake news (misinformation and disinformation). On the other hand, the state has blamed the desire for profit and commodification of news for the rise of fake news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizen journalism is increasingly practiced worldwide due to the expansion of the Internet, new media technologies, and social media platforms. This study investigated Malaysia's citizen journalism through young journalist’s perspective by understanding the concepts and roles of citizen journalists. The analysis demonstrated that young citizen journalists view opportunities and empowerment from a new angle. The results illustrated that citizen journalism in Malaysia provides a potential prospect for citizen journalists as well as a role in inspiring young people. Based on the present paper, it is suggested that future research should explore the guidelines to distinguish Malaysian citizen journalists from the conventional keyboard warriors and cyber troopers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study applies the concepts of interpretive communities and conversational interactions to show how investigative journalists initiated a relatively new method of reporting and generated support among their colleagues for becoming anti-Nazi activists and troll hunters. It draws on a sample of journalistic reporting and related media items to examine investigative reporters' self-reflexive acts and the responses of journalism communities in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States from 2015 to 2020. Investigative journalists initiated open conversations to show that they were enthusiastic activists in retweeting, confronting and quoting neo-Nazi trolling by interviewing the perpetrators. Other journalism communities signified they were pursuing activist-like agendas as they magnified this work through informal networks, social media and news commentaries. Journalists reconsidered their professional boundaries to allow for cooperative conversations about their experiences in a fresh effort to denounce hate speech and begin collective initiatives to enhance social cohesion in civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary on the 2018 special issue of the Journal of American Folklore, "Fake News: Definitions and Approaches" argues that digital networks have enabled fake news by amplification. Fake news by amplification occurs when small- scale events become amplified through the convergent actions of everyday users, mass media gatekeepers, and social media algorithms. Events that are amplified risk becoming distorted as they circulate, with users supplying their own context and interpretations. The resulting fake news is difficult to counter because it goes beyond questions of fact and enters the realm of interpretation, enabled by widespread networked belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines #SayHerName as a case study to analyze how circulation of the hashtag both challenged women's erasure from #BlackLivesMatter discourse and motivated activists to center the stories of Black women killed in police interactions. We introduce the term rhetorical stratification to discern why the #SayHerName hashtag came to matter, and how it remained relevant in the national discourse about police brutality. To do so, we analyze how the #SayHerName movement evolved from the discursive to the material through policy briefs, social media circulation, and citizen journalism, which influenced news framing and initiated greater deliberation about this issue in both the networked public sphere and in local communities. We conclude that this hashtag invitation to digital activists engaged more nuanced perspectives about police brutality and policy reform, influenced the way Black women victims of police violence are covered in the news, and motivated community-based policy proposals addressing necessary changes in local policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing interest with the practice of sharing news stories through social media has driven a move in scholarship away from the "news" aspect and towards the "sharing" aspect. As more news is distributed using social media, its use as social glue becomes increasingly significant. Accordingly, this paper places news sharing in the sociological tradition of gift-giving studies, viewing it as a manifestation of care, above and beyond the informational utility of a shared news item. This paper uses data from focus groups of 88 people who routinely share news on social media, and a survey of 2,000 news sharers. The intention is to complement existing studies of the sociality of news sharing by offering an account of the interplay between the who, why and what of news sharing which places it in the relational realm of gifts given and received as a mechanism to demonstrate care and contribute to social cohesion. It proposes the concept of phatic news sharing to account for this emerging use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined instructor and learner experiences in a Journalism for Social Change (JSC) Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) designed to introduce learners around the world to constructive, solutions-based journalism techniques, as well as engage learners in developing news stories promoting positive change about critical child welfare (CW) issues. Mixed-methods were used to identify five themes across instructor and learner experiences. Results suggest MOOCs have the potential to increase learners’ journalism content knowledge and to mobilize citizen journalists around social justice topics impacting communities. This study adds to an ongoing body of work investigating MOOC design for changing attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Changing structures to online news have instigated concerns that the electorate may predominantly consume soft news for entertainment purposes while neglecting public affairs information. The Internet in particular brought an increase in outlets, including unconventional low-credibility sources. A 2 x 2 x 2 within-subjects experiment (n = 197) investigated whether delivery format (print vs online) and source type (high vs low credibility) shape the extent to which recipients select different types of news (public affairs news vs soft news). Participants browsed 32 news items, half of them hard news and the other half soft news, either associated with high- or low-credibility sources, and did so online or via print magazine. Results show that greater preference for online news fostered selective exposure to hard news. Greater habitual news use via social media reduced selective exposure to news from high-credibility sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even democracies endowed with the most active free press struggle to maintain diversity of news coverage. Consolidation and market forces may cause only a few dominant players to control the news cycle. Editorial policies may be biased by corporate ownership relations, narrowing news coverage and focus. To an increasing degree this problem also applies to social media news distribution, since it is subject to the same socio-economic drivers. To study the effects of consolidation and ownership on news diversity, we model the diversity of Chilean coverage on the basis of ownership records and social media data. We create similarity networks of news outlets on the basis of their ownership and the topics they cover. We then examine the relationships between the topology of ownership networks and content similarity to characterize how ownership affects news coverage. A network analysis reveals that Chilean media is highly concentrated both in terms of ownership as well as in terms of topics covered. Our method can be used to determine which groups of outlets and ownership exert the greatest influence on news coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background This article explores the complexity of citizen participation in social media and crowdsourced journalism by utilizing the case of r/SyrianCivilWar, the sub-community of Reddit where users discuss the Syrian crisis. Analysis In examining the limitations and affordances of the platform, the article identifies features that characterize the r/SyrianCivilWar community, namely: algorithmic driven public discourse, deliberative communication, reflexivity and transparency, and database journalism. These features shape the functioning of the community and have broader implications for citizen crowdsourced journalism projects. Conclusion and implications The article demonstrates that alternative media practices, such as crowdsourced journalism, are limited in their capacity to reach mainstream consciousness. In the commodified landscape of media, portability--a capacity for complex issues to be distilled into a simple or simplified concept--is made important. [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 paper considers American strategies for countering ISIS social media, focusing on notions of narrative and rational debate in the Web 2.0 era. In addition to chronicling an evolution in American governmental ideas about the online public sphere, the paper looks specifically at the work of Al-Tamimi, an open source journalist who verifies and catalogues original ISIS documentation. Using both textual analyses and long-form interviews with Al-Tamimi as evidence, the paper argues that Al-Tamimi’s archival work serves to disrupt emotionally driven, logically questionable narratives about ISIS, whether they emerge from the group itself or its Western opponents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From a communication perspective, social movements of international significance such as the Arab Spring, Toronto G20, Spanish 15M or Occupy Wall Street have been characterized by the use of mobile communication and social media as tools for video activism and counter-surveillance against the abuse of power committed by the state forces. A representative case of this reality, which reached a high coverage and support in social media environment, can be found in the riots that took place in the Gamonal neighbourhood (Burgos, Spain) in January 2014. In this regard, this article focuses on the denunciation of police violence through video activism by Twitter users during the demonstrations across the country, applying a quantitative–qualitative mixed methodology. First, by means of a content analysis, a sample of 784 tweets linked to videos is analysed in order to identify the main topics and functions of the shared content. Second, a textual analysis of those linked videos of a violent nature recorded by witnesses in order to document police interventions is carried out. The prominent use of Twitter for distributing videos to denounce police violence stands out among the main findings, underlining the audiovisual exposure and ‘secondary visibility’ of the police officers. The results obtained also reinforce the idea of citizen empowerment through the development of an alternative form of journalism, as a practice to criticize the mainstream media coverage of the protests. Additionally, this article sheds light on the open debate about the relevance of social media to encourage citizen involvement in a face-to-face interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One thriving area of research on participatory media revolves around political expression and the creation of political content. This study analyzes the connections between these behaviors, heterogeneous information networks, and ideological extremity while accounting for the role of emotional intelligence. Results from a two-wave-panel survey of US adults show that people who engage in content-expressive behavior are embedded in heterogeneous information networks and that emotional intelligence moderates the relationship between content-expressive behavior and ideological extremity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the main modern approaches to the citizen journalism in Russia and defines its key features at the present stage. The publishing activity of the citizen journalists of two Russian platforms "Ridus" and "LiveJournal" was analyzed over a time span of five months in 2017. The analysis results were used as a basis for describing peculiar content features of the Russian citizen journalism, its nature and specifics of information presentation, and for identifying the areas of concern. The paper also deals with social aspects of the citizen journalism as a tool of the civil society enabling the development of a firm civil standing of the audience and encouraging professional media to perform its functions as a social communication institution at a higher quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several recent studies have examined how professional journalists use social media at work. However, we know little about the differences between younger and older journalists' use of social media for newsgathering. We conducted 16 in-depth interviews comparing eight young journalists (median age = 24) with eight older journalists (median age = 50) in Norway. The younger journalists reported using multiple social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, to collect politically significant information, news observations, sources and comments. By comparison, the older journalists reported relying heavily on elite sources on Twitter. This reluctance to use a variety of social media platforms may limit older journalists' exposure to a variety of news sources. As a result, younger journalists seem to follow a more multi-perspectival approach to social media and may be more innovative in their newsgathering. Hence, younger journalists may be exposed to more diverse types of news sources than older journalists. Together, the findings indicate a generational gap in 'networked publics' concerning how younger and older journalists approach newsgathering in social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Statutory Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) who act as the guardians of data protection across the European Economic Area (EEA) have faced unprecedented interpretative challenges as a result of the explosion of indeterminate publication by individuals in the form of blogs, social networking and other online forums. Through both a questionnaire and systematic review of EEA DPA websites, this article finds that these regulators have generally adopted a strict interpretation of the law here, although considerable internal variation is also present. Almost all see data protection as engaged, around half argue that publication in the general social networking context requires data subject consent and even when individual publication is targeted towards the collective public many DPAs demonstrate some reluctance to apply the special expressive purposes (aka the journalistic) derogation. This article argues for an alternative tripartite approach under the forthcoming Regulation which accommodates the competing free expression rights and also the limited capabilities reasonably to be expected of private individuals on a sounder and more consistent basis. The law's personal exemption should cover individual publication so long as this does not pose a serious prima facie risk to privacy or other fundamental data protection rights. The special expressive purposes derogation should protect individuals who are disseminating a message to the collective public without discrimination. Finally, the Regulation's new freedom of expression clause should ensure that individual publication which principally instantiates self-expression is subject only to the core of data protection's substantive and supervisory provisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gezi Park Resistance is widely accepted as a turning point in the role and power of social media in Turkey. I will attempt to substantiate this major claim by tracking several aspects of online activism. I take online activism in the broadest level, including notable non-profit cases with a social mission. This inclusion inevitably includes citizen journalism networks (140Journos, DokuzSekiz Haber) but also several mapping projects (Mülksüzleijtirme, DirenÇevre), digital literacy mobilizations, such as crypto-parties (Istanbul Hackerspace), and their possible integration to political mainstream (special attention is given to pro-Kurdish HDP party volunteers, or election volunteers, Oy ve Ötesi). I intend to bring a more pro-active approach. That is, instead of dealing web censorship and digital surveillance at the center of paper, I will contextualize them in the background while focusing on citizens' claim of the web as a place of freedom of expression and opposition. While doing this, I will track cases before and after Gezi Resistance and will try to determine whether there is a substantive change or continuity. However, my major focus will be the aftermath and I will opt for a semi-ethnographic approach (with a perspective of multi-sited ethnography) in addition to discourse analysis. I have been involved in many of the digital emergences, continued to organize citizen journalism seminars not only in Istanbul but in some other major cities in Turkey and I have tracked digital emergences as part of my jury work at Deutsche Welle Best of Online Activism annual awards. Still, I did not act as an organic intellectual in many instances but followed discussions which could be framed as a public debates among Gezi related citizens. Thus ethnographic work will be merged with a study of partial history of thoughts approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to assess the level of legal security of social media users and so-called citizen journalists, we need to answer the question that according to current EU journalistic laws, information published by them can be granted the status of expression for journalistic purposes and, if so, under what conditions could this be done? In order to achieve this purpose, a review of literature, acts of law, their discussion and interpretation was conducted, and the netnography method was applied. Our analysis shows that social media users have the same rights when exercising freedom of expression as professional journalists. In our opinion equalising the legal status of an ordinary publication with a press release, both from the perspective of Article 10 of the ECHR and Article 85 of the GDPR, takes place under certain conditions. They are listed on a casuistic basis in the jurisdiction of the ECtHR and the ECJ and interpreted according to the concept of social media responsibility. The conducted research shows, however, that assessing the legal status of the user's speech is very complicated and requires legal knowledge and knowledge of jurisprudence. This factor significantly affects the level of information security and the actual scope of protection of the freedom of speech of Internet users participating in public debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the events of the Arab Spring, this article considers the visual language of the protest within geopolitical contexts characterized by violent repression and state monopoly on information media. The author looks at the ways new technologies – namely mobile phones and social media – are used to produce and disseminate counter-documentation that actively challenges states of invisibility and conditions of deformation. The regime of visibility and visuality of the protestors’ statements are analysed in their relation to existing systems of power and to the channels of distribution of information through an examination of the material conditions of their production and reception, and through an attempt at retracing their erratic and multiple trajectories – from YouTube’s unsanctioned and unchecked collections, to international news broadcasts, to their re-presentation in public screenings and in works of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A plethora of media platforms were involved in communicating recent protests across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), though it remains unclear exactly how these interacted. This qualitative article, based primarily on interviews with British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) newsworkers, explores the networked linkages between social and broadcast media, asking how social media content moved into broadcast news, which standards shaped the interface between the two and how these standards were defined. It finds that a set of normative and practical standards caused significant friction at the interface, which is reduced as content assimilates these standards. Standards are shaped mainly in response to broadcast imperatives, but also through the mainstreaming of social media and more efficacious and practicable networked communicative practices, indicating how power may shift in the networked age. Responding to the optimistic view that networked multimedia environments enable unencumbered communication, it argues that the scope and limits of communicative affordances depend on these standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In striving to better understand issues associated with citizen contributions to newsmaking in crisis situations, this article identifies and elaborates four specific research problematics – bearing witness, technologies of truth-telling, mediating visualities and affectivities of othering – in order to recast more familiar modes of enquiry. Specifically, it provides an alternative heuristic to theorize the journalistic mediation of citizen imagery, and the myriad ways this process of negotiation maintains, repairs and at times disrupts the interstices of professional–amateur boundaries. Rather than centring analysis on how crisis events highlight change, it discerns the basis for a critical tracing of the material configurations and contingencies shaping journalistic imperatives towards generating visually truthful reportage. In seeking to move debates about how best to enliven digital journalism's future beyond the polarities of new media advocacy and criticism alike, we emphasize the importance of developing a collaborative, co-operative ethos of connectivity between journalists as citizens and citizens as journalists. Accordingly, each proposed problematic is examined in a manner alert to pinpointing its prospective value for theory-building, and in so doing elucidating its potential utility for scholarship in the years ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the unique forms of digital labor that emerged in the wake of the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Donetsk, Ukraine in July of 2014. Whereas such investigations traditionally rely on expert analysis and strict information control, the Ukrainians took an unconventional, open-source approach to the case. By releasing key pieces of video evidence on social media, the Ukrainian government recruited a vast roster of skilled online analysts to work on its behalf without expending any financial resources. Placing this user activity in the context of scholarly studies of both fan labor and citizen surveillance, the paper argues that social and economic aspects of online culture enabled Ukraine to benefit significantly from the discourse produced by unpaid workers. Ultimately, the output of these laborers played a key role in counteracting Russia's use of global broadcasting and expensive online propaganda to dominate international debate surrounding MH17. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses topics within the issue, including social media news sharing, agenda setting, and citizen journalism, as well as the journal's move from Chicago style citation to American Psychological Association (APA) style citation.

This study examines the extent to which professional journalism adopts and uses citizen journalism, such as user-generated content (UGC) and user-submitted stories (USS), at the individual, organizational, and community levels. In doing so, the study adopts a web-based survey of top U.S. news editors (n = 142) coupled with U.S. Census Data. The study reveals that experience as online journalists and online staff size play roles in the adoption and use of UGC. The study also finds that community structural pluralism is related to the adoption and use of news stories written together by professional and citizen journalists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examined the joint effect of message and personality attributes on online news sharing. In two experiments (N = 270, N = 275), readers indicated their likelihood to share news representing two content domains and three informational utility dimensions. A moderated mediation path analysis was used. On average, news consumers shared news containing informational utility. Opinion leaders shared news irrespective of informational utility because they discerned informational utility in news that, objectively speaking, lacked such utility. In one experiment, opinion leaders also were more likely than nonleaders to share news perceived to contain informational utility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Analyses of survey results from a random sample of women bloggers (N = 298) show three motivations drive women to use social media – information, engagement, and recreation. The recreation motivation outweighs the other two motivations in predicting frequency of social media use. However, when differences between Facebook, Twitter, and other social media were considered, results show women bloggers turn to social media in general for recreation, but to Facebook for engagement and to Twitter for information. Findings also show that psychological needs for affiliation and self-disclosure are related to the engagement motivation, and self-disclosure is associated with the information motivation. The results are discussed in relation to need theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the emerging modes of civic engagement connected to the mobile camera-phone, and the ways in which they require us to rethink what it is to bear witness to brutality in the age of fundamentally camera-mediated mass self-publication. I argue that the camera-phone permits entirely new performative rituals of bearing witness, such as dissenting bodies en masse recording their own repression and, via wireless global communication networks, effectively mobilizing this footage as graphic testimony in a bid to produce feelings of political solidarity. Critically, the performance of what I elect to call ‘citizen camera-witnessing’, as exemplified by contemporary street opposition movements including those in Burma, Iran, Egypt, Libya and Syria, derives its potency from the ways it reactivates the idea of martyrdom: that is, from its distinct claim to truth in the name of afflicted people who put their bodies on the line to record the injustice of oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This commentary considers citizen journalism emerging from the Syrian Civil War and argues that its usefulness is dependent on an “interpreter tier” of user-generated media analysts. In contrast to discourse celebrating more direct forms of citizen journalism, the piece emphasizes the importance of intermediary layers of meaning-making as the means by which complex fields of amateur information can be made intelligible. This “interpreter tier,” although often ignored in popular and scholarly discourse, takes on an increasingly important function as mainstream sources must increasingly rely on citizen materials produced in far off places. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Marca Community is arguably one of the most popular online sports communities in Spain with over 400,000 members. In its forum, users can comment on the news published by the sport-based newspapers Marca while interacting with other members. Drawing on the existing literature on virtual communities, this study empirically examines the engagement in online discussion in order to determine the degree of “community building" promoted by the members. We propose a methodological approach taking under consideration the singularities of the sports fans and of the online conversation. A structural analysis focusing on the user interaction was conducted over the members (N=4,967) who posted comments in 8 selected articles. The findings suggest that Marca Community is a non-hierarchical liquid network wherein members participate in an equal footing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] We investigated Twitter’s use in citizen journalism in the Wisconsin labor protests. [•] Study of 775,030 tweets revealed differences in mobile and non-mobile use. [•] Mobile users were more likely to post news links. [•] Tweets with links also contained more hashtags than those without. [•] Results suggest two-part #wiunion network: protesters and virtual supporters. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The social network burst in the Spanish Radio in the period between 2009-2010, transforming profoundly the relation with the listeners, and enriching significally the emission. The purpose of this study is to analyze the results of this symbiosis among media, in addition to the disparate benefit among various distant channels regarding this new tool. We will test out this decisive use, but incipient, and the clear superiority of Facebook over Twitter, the two most used platforms. Regarding the profile of whom they manage today the network in the Radio Station, it is notable that there is a lack of specific training in the community management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To grasp the current status of network public opinion (NPO) research and explore the knowledge base and hot trends from a quantitative perspective, we retrieved 1385 related papers and conducted a bibliometric mapping analysis on them. Co-occurrence analysis, cluster analysis, co-citation analysis and keyword burst analysis were performed using VOSviewer and CiteSpace software. The results show that the NPO is mainly distributed in the disciplinary fields associated with journalism and communication and public management. There are four main hotspots: analysis of public opinion, analysis of communication channels, technical means and challenges faced. The knowledge base in the field of NPO research includes social media, user influence, and user influence related to opinion dynamic modeling and sentiment analysis. With the advent of the era of big data, big data technology has been widely used in various fields and to some extent can be said to be the research frontier in the field. Transforming big data public opinion into early warning, realizing in-depth analysis and accurate prediction of public opinion as well as improving decision-making ability of public opinion are the future research directions of NPO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, policing organisations have become increasingly savvy at producing positive images of police work through both the old and new media via the growth in professionalised police public relations (PR) infrastructure. This image work comes as a response to a number of modern policing and political challenges such as the public fear of crime, a range of police reform agendas, the perceived crisis in policing consent and the withering of ‘old media’ such as newspapers and a proliferation of new media, social media and citizen journalism. With a growing body of international research pointing to the need for policing organisations to foster public confidence and organisational legitimacy through the practice of procedural and distributive justice, much less research has looked at public confidence in the context of police media work. Based on original qualitative data,1 which includes interviews with key uniformed and civilian directors of PR branches in Australian police organisations, this article constitutes a comparative case study and explores how media and PR directors within Australian police organisations conceive of the links between their ‘image work’, public confidence in the organisation, trust in policing and legitimacy in the police institution. We investigate both the discourses and practices of public confidence raising amongst a number of elite police PR managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]