Citizen Reporters

A fascinating history of the rise and fall of influential Gilded Age magazine McClure’s and the two unlikely outsiders at its helm—as well as a timely, full-throated defense of investigative journalism in America The president of the United States made headlines around the world when he publicly attacked the press, denouncing reporters who threatened his reputation as “muckrakers” and “forces for evil.” The year was 1906, the president was Theodore Roosevelt—and the publication that provoked his fury was McClure’s magazine. One of the most influential magazines in American history, McClure’s drew over 400,000 readers and published the groundbreaking stories that defined the Gilded Age, including the investigation of Standard Oil that toppled the Rockefeller monopoly. Driving this revolutionary publication were two improbable newcomers united by single-minded ambition. S. S. McClure was an Irish immigrant, who, despite bouts of mania, overthrew his impoverished upbringing and bent the New York media world to his will. His steadying hand and star reporter was Ida Tarbell, a woman who defied gender expectations and became a notoriously fearless journalist. The scrappy, bold McClure's group—Tarbell, McClure, and their reporters Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens—cemented investigative journalism’s crucial role in democracy. From reporting on labor unrest and lynching, to their exposés of municipal corruption, their reporting brought their readers face to face with a nation mired in dysfunction. They also introduced Americans to the voices of Willa Cather, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and many others. Tracing McClure’s from its meteoric rise to its spectacularly swift and dramatic combustion, Citizen Reporters is a thrillingly told, deeply researched biography of a powerhouse magazine that forever changed American life. It’s also a timely case study that demonstrates the crucial importance of journalists who are unafraid to speak truth to power.

Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives' examines the spontaneous actions of ordinary people, caught up in extraordinary events, and compelled to adopt the role of a news reporter. This collection of twenty-one chapters investigates citizen journalism in the West, including the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia, as well as its development in other national contexts around the globe, including Brazil, China, India, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Palestine, South Korea, Vietnam, and even Antarctica. Its aim is to assess the contribution of citizen journalism to crisis reporting, and to encourage new forms of dialogue and debate about how it may be improved in the future. The book contains contributions by Mark Deuze about 'The Future of Citizen Journalism' and Paul Bradshaw about 'Wiki Journalism.

This timely book explores how the internet and social media have permanently altered the media landscape, enabling new actors to enter the marketplace, and changing the way that news is generated, published and consumed. It examines the importance of citizen journalists, whose newsgathering and publication activities have made them crucial to public discourse and central actors in the communication revolution. Investigating how the internet and social media have enabled citizen journalism to flourish, and what this means for the traditional institutional press, the public sphere, and media freedom, the book demonstrates how communication and legal theory are applied in practice.

The Encyclopedia of American Journalism explores the distinctions found in print media, radio, television, and the internet. This work seeks to document the role of these different forms of journalism in the formation of America's understanding and reaction to political campaigns, war, peace, protest, slavery, consumer rights, civil rights, immigration, unionism, feminism, environmentalism, globalization, and more. This work also explores the intersections between journalism and other phenomena in American Society, such as law, crime, business, and consumption. The evolution of journalism's ethical standards is discussed, as well as the important libel and defamation trials that have influenced journalistic practice, its legal protection, and legal responsibilities. Topics covered include: Associations and Organizations; Historical Overview and Practice; Individuals; Journalism in American History; Laws, Acts, and Legislation; Print, Broadcast, Newsgroups, and Corporations; Technologies.

Understanding Citizen Journalism as Civic Participation re-conceptualizes citizen journalism in the context of Habermas’s theory of the public sphere and communicative action, to examine how citizen journalism practice as civic participation may contribute to a heathier community and democracy in the civil society context. Citizen journalism has garnered growing attention owing to the participation of ordinary citizens in the performance of news production. Drawing on the authors’ decade-long collaboration on citizen journalism scholarship, this book posits a theoretical framework that relies on diverse communication perspectives to understand citizen journalism practice and its democratic consequences. This book will be of great relevance to scholars, researchers, professionals and policy makers working in the field of journalism and media studies, culture studies, and communication studies.

Rena Bivens takes the reader inside TV newsrooms to explore how news organisations are responding to the paradigmatic shifts in media and communication practices.

Citizen Journalism explores citizen participation in the news as an evolving disruptive practice in digital journalism. This volume moves beyond the debates over the mainstream news media attempts to control and contain citizen journalism to focus attention in a different direction: the peripheries of traditional journalism. Here, more independent forms of citizen journalism, enabled by social media, are creating their own forms of news. Among the actors at the boundaries of the professional journalism field the book identifies are the engaged citizen journalist and the enraged citizen journalist. The former consists of under-represented voices leading social justice movements, while the latter reflects the views of conservatives and the alt-right, who often view citizen journalism as a performance. Citizen Journalism further explores how non-journalism arenas, such as citizen science, enable ordinary citizens to collect data and become protectors of the environment. Citizen Journalism serves as an important reminder of the professional field’s failure to effectively respond to the changing nature of public communication. These changes have helped to create new spaces for new actors; in such places, traditional as well as upstart forms of journalism negotiate and compete, ultimately aiding the journalism field in creating its future.

Media prognosticators have been declaring the death of radio, daily newspapers, journalistic ethics, and even journalism itself. This is an introductory text on how to think, report, write, and present news across platforms. It aims to prepare journalism students for the future of news reporting.