Trends in the Journalism Studies Research on Citizen Journalism

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference reflects on the recent history of journalism studies, and starts with the excellent Raul Ferrer-Connill and a paper on the past 20 years of scholarship on citizen journalism. His team reviewed a sample of some 170 articles on citizen journalism to explore the theories, contexts, and methodologies of their research.

Some 50% of these studies did not identify a clear theoretical framework; the other half used structuration theory, field theory, uses and gratifications, gatekeeping, and a variety of other theoretical frameworks. Some one third of these studies focussed on North America, while between 15% and 9% covered Europe, Asia, and Africa; very few studies examined Latin America.

Most of this work has been published in Journalism Practice, Journalism, and Digital Journalism, and some 33% focusses on news production, with aspects like motivation and perception, new media technologies, and impacts and roles represented in smaller percentages of articles. Some half of these studies were qualitative, with the remainder quantitative, multi- or mixed-method, or conceptual.

What has been done should also provide us with pointers to the kind of research that still ought to be done; aspects relating to platform governance and audience analytics, for instance, remain underrepresented and could be further investigated.