The concept of journalism—the gathering and reporting of news and information for public edification—has changed dramatically in recent decades. Traditional print and broadcast outlets remain, but an explosion of alternative news sources has diminished their influence.
Among the most important new developments is the rise of the citizen journalist, commonly defined as an independent, unaffiliated news gatherer who reports via social media such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as other outlets, such as blogs, newsletters, and podcasts. The audience may amount to a few dozen or up to several million, depending on the journalist’s reach.
The citizen journalist is not a new phenomenon. In America it dates back to the birth of the United States, when activist patriots printed pamphlets explaining why they supported the colonies’ independence from Britain. One of the most famous and influential of those citizen journalists was Thomas Paine, whose roughly 50-page pamphlet Common Sense methodically outlined why the 13 colonies should overthrow British rule. Such publications went a long way toward informing public opinion.
During the American Civil War, diaries kept by soldiers and civilians provided unique insights into and understanding of the devastating events the diarists were witnessing. Think of such diaries as primitive blogs. Most of these first-person accounts were not intended for public viewing, but many became important informational documents for historians that supplemented reporting by the mainstream newspapers and magazines of the day.
Even fiction has been used as a reporting device. One of the most influential instances of this was Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, based on six months of investigative research, which exposed dangerous labor and sanitation conditions within the American meatpacking industry. The book enraged the public and contributed to the creation of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.
The modern concept of the citizen journalist can be traced to 2000, when South Korean online entrepreneur Oh Yeon-ho noted that “every citizen is a reporter.” Oh and three colleagues started an online daily newspaper, OhmyNews, because they were dissatisfied with the traditional South Korean press. A call for volunteer reporters drew hundreds of responses, and by 2007 OhmyNews had grown to 50,000 contributors in 100 countries.
The advent of the Internet dramatically drove the growth of citizen journalism by giving amateur journalists the unique platforms they needed to report news frequently unknown or ignored by the mainstream press. As a result, online forums initially created to share personal news soon became public news distribution systems. It didn’t take long for mainstream news organizations to start using the same platforms to share and promote their own news-gathering efforts.
In recent years citizen journalists played an important role in reporting breaking news, often as it was happening. For example, bloggers and others joined forces to show the world the real-time consequences of major disasters, such as the tsunami that devastated Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in 2004. Citizen journalists also provided embedded coverage of international political uprisings such as the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, and important medical stories such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
One area in which citizen journalists have been especially useful is coverage of “neighborhood news”—local stories that are often missed by mainstream outlets. Through Facebook, Twitter, and other online platforms, as well as podcasts, blogs, and self-published newspapers, citizen journalists can easily and inexpensively report on local activities and bring to light issues of regional importance. These methods have also enabled citizen journalists to report on the problems facing the socially disenfranchised, individuals often without a public voice.
The idea that “every citizen is a reporter” has sometimes put citizen journalists at odds with mainstream media. Critics of citizen journalism commonly complain that most of its practitioners lack the education and experience of mainstream journalists as well as the institutional infrastructure that guarantees a certain level of professionalism. For example, mainstream news organizations typically have editors, attorneys, and fact-checkers to ensure high standards of reporting and ethics. Citizen journalists, however, usually lack such support systems.
Mainstream journalists also enjoy a tacit right to cover the news that citizen journalists may not. This is especially true among law enforcement agencies, which tend to be more approving of a credentialed journalist than an unaffiliated blogger with a cell phone.
As a result, citizen journalists face far greater risk of persecution for doing their job. In the United States it’s not uncommon for citizen journalists to be arrested for recording police activity, despite a court-confirmed First Amendment right to do so.
Persecution of citizen journalists is even more severe in authoritarian countries, where the government often controls the national media. In China, for example, citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, who was also a lawyer, was sentenced to four years in prison in 2020 for reporting about COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, via Twitter, WeChat, and YouTube. Zhang’s case sparked international outrage, and the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom all called for her release.
As citizen journalists became more prominent in reporting news around the world, their efforts led to the democratization of information. Today anyone with a cell phone can be both reporter and audience. In many ways, Twitter, YouTube, and similar online platforms have become as important in informing the public as major newspapers and broadcast networks were just a couple of decades ago.