Here you can find an interesting paper from Bruns, Wilson and Saunders, exploring the roles that citizen journalism might assume in a networked media system. It is less revolutionary as Bruns’ article on the networked ideal model of deliberative democracy. It is more focused too: it takes as a starting to point the claim that “online citizen journalism is unable to conduct investigative and first-hand reporting” – which I guess I often seem to agree with.
(I do. Well, with some reserves.)
The article on the other hand formulates a much more articulate argument, giving examples how, in what context could “first-hand reporting” be a function of citizen journalists. However, it also reaches the conclusion that the professional side cannot be taken out of the equation (for me the most interesting point was the finding that on a semi-professional news site pros articles attracted most of the attention, but amateur journalists’ posts generated more comments and discussion).
I commented on the article on Bruns’ blog, hopefully my comment won’t be lost in one of the spam filters.
