After Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism, What's Next?

It looks like there are a good half dozen edited collections about citizen journalism that are currently under development; some of them are probably spurred on by the impending U.S. presidential election and the role that news bloggers and citizen journalists will undoubtedly play in it, but I'm also aware of collections being developed as far afield as Australia, Germany, and India (and I've written contributions for a few of them). One of them, Megan Boler's Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times is about to be released, and is already listed on Amazon - as I've mentioned here previously, my chapter deals mainly with the question of what citizen journalism may become, beyond the short-term tactical pleasures of stirring up the mainstream journalism industry.

Meanwhile, the launch of e-Journalism: New Directions in Electronic News Media, edited by Kiran Prasad for the Indian scholarly community, is still a few months away, but I've received permission to make a pre-print of my chapter "News Blogs and Citizen Journalism" available here. It weaves together a few of the threads that I've followed over the past few months - it presents gatewatching as a practice that is fundamental to citizen journalism, outlines citizen-journalistic practices of news produsage beyond gatewatching itself, highlights the role of citizen journalists as providing an important corrective to media bias in covering the 2007 Australian federal election, and sketches potential pathways towards a greater symbiosis of citizen and mainstream approaches to journalism, beyond any initial antagonism, beyond the two-tier mainstream/alternative media structure outlined by Herbert Gans. Towards the end, therefore, I return again to that crucial question of "What next?":

At the heart of these developments lies a question of "Other than to criticise the establishment, what do we want?", and it is this question which the gatewatchers, news bloggers, and citizen journalists of the post-industrial mediasphere must now confront for themselves. The troubled state of the mainstream journalism industry means that many news organisations as well as audiences are wide open for newcomers with fresh ideas and innovative approaches to reporting, analysing, and debating the news - citizen journalists are therefore faced with an opportunity to move beyond a merely oppositional stance, even beyond citizen journalism as such, and towards the development of effective and successful pro-am models which combine the best elements of both professional and citizen journalism in a variety of innovative news publications that are more appropriate to the user-led, collaborative media environments of the early information age. They, and we, cannot afford to waste this opportunity.

We're now starting to see the emergence of a few of these pro-am models, I think - and I'd be very interested in where you think the future lies, and what sites work for you. Any comments?

(Cross-posted at Gatewatching.org.)

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