Community Correspondent: One Broadcaster's Attempt at Citizen Journalism.

This paper applies gatekeeping theory to examine Community Correspondent, an online citizen journalism web site created by Pappas Telecasting, a privately held television broadcasting company. The company declares the site to be for the non-journalist citizen, and urges people to report on things that matter to them. Because Community Correspondent is one of the first ventures by a local broadcaster into citizen journalism, the study investigates who is contributing, if contributors are fulfilling the site's purpose, and what kinds of items are posted. The study is a content analysis of 179 contributions by citizens to Community Correspondent sites hosted by Pappas stations in three markets-Fresno, Omaha, and El Paso. Citizen contributions were classified as community bulletin board items, station promotional items, comments on stories in the news, original stories, and other. Most contributions were original stories, and more were videos than text. However, more than half the items posted on the El Paso site were submitted by station employees, and most of those were station promotions, contrary to the mission of Community Correspondent. The researcher suggests that the lack of gatekeeping on the Community Correspondent sites contributes to a lack of quality and usefulness of the citizen-generated items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]