Broadly defined, citizen reporters refer to individuals who
produce, disseminate, and exchange a wide variety of news
and information, ranging from current topics and common
interests to individual issues. Citizen reporters are interchangeable with citizen journalists. As citizen reporters or journalists are distinguished from professional reporters
or journalists, there are various terms that indicate citizen
reporters, including but not limited to amateur and grassroots reporters or journalists. In addition, as new communication technologies, such as the World Wide Web (or
Web) and Weblogs (or blogs), enable citizens to create and
deliver news and information, citizen reporters often are
referred to as bloggers, wikimedians, or cyberjouralists (or
cyberreporters).
The journalistic practices by citizen reporters are
defined as citizen journalism, through which ordinary citizens write, report, edit, and send image, text, video, and
audio to other audiences. Citizen journalism (also known as
participatory journalism) can be distinguished from civic
journalism (also known as public or community journalism). Citizen journalism is maintained by citizens who are
often marginalized and dissociated with mainstream news
media, whereas civic journalism is operated by professional
reporters or journalists. Simply put, citizen journalism is
“by” citizens, whereas civic journalism is “of” and “for”
citizens.
Historical Background and Origins
Before there were newspapers in America there were citizen journalists. Noah Newman reported “the cry of terrified
persons” when more than three hundred Native Americans
clashed with Plymouth colonists in the Battle of Medfield
on February 21, 1676. The first colonial newspaper, Public
Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick, was still fourteen years away when Newman and John Cotton exchanged
reports in a newsletter network of “many overtaken by the
enemy and kilt” in what came to be known as King Philip’s
War in the colonies. Of the 549 Puritan publications that
appeared between 1638 and 1690, several include reports
from citizen reporters. Typical is the October 30, 1683, correspondence from Portsmouth minister Joshua Moodey to
Increase Mather in Boston regarding the “monstrous birth”
of a stillborn baby to a follower of Anne Hutchinson, who
had been banished from Massachusetts Bay because of her
antinomian view that salvation did not rest on obedience to
church doctrine. The following year Mather’s Essay for the
Recording of Illustrious Providences made much of what
happened to those who disobeyed Puritan authority.
Throughout the nineteenth century, frontier editors
relied on citizen journalists to report on events beyond the
reach of one-man newspaper operations. Characteristic
was the June 1895 investigation by Routt County authorities into the apparent suicide of a mining engineer named
Wills outside a prospecting camp near Craig, Colorado. A
citizen reporter found that Wills had attended a medical
college in Louisville before making $75,000 in mining
near Helena. The Craig Courier of June 22 would report
that before opening his mouth to a 44-40 Martin safety
gun, Wills had pinned a note to his coat saying, “I cease
the struggle for existence. I do myself the mercy to escape
the horrors which poverty heaps upon me. Do what you
please with what I leave and stick my carcass in a hole anywhere.” Citizen reporters frequently captured the poignant
impermanence of pioneering culture into the early twentieth century. A citizen journalist offered an eyewitness
account in the July 10, 1919, edition of Colorado’s Moffat
County Courier of a Sterling County man who discovered
his wife, mother, and two children were drowned when an
eight-foot wall of water overturned their car after it stalled
in the sands of Pawnee Creek.
During the twentieth century, technology evolved so that
not the anonymous but the well-known could be covered by
citizen reporters. Abraham Zapruder used a spring-wound
Bell and Howell eight-millimeter camera to capture twentysix seconds of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination
at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
Three days later, CBS reporter Dan Rather used the viewing
of Zapruder’s coverage to speculate that Kennedy had been
killed by a lone gunman. On that day, Life magazine purchased exclusive rights to the Zapruder film for $150,000.
The film would be a critical piece of evidence in the Warren Commission’s subsequent investigation of the Kennedy
assassination.
In the new millennium, the growth of digital technologies enabled millions to become citizen reporters while
permitting millions to see and hear their work. As late as
August 16, 2006, 1,613 calls made from individuals trapped
in the World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2001,
were released to survivor families and the public. Network television relied heavily on citizen reporters to capture the devastating tsunami that struck the Indian Ocean
on December 26, 2004, killing 230,000 people in a swath
of death from Indonesia to East Africa. Survivor blogs on
the Gulf Coast were among the first reports filed after the
August 29–August 30, 2005 passage of Hurricane Katrina
across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida that
would kill more than thirteen hundred and displace more
than one million others.
The Technology of Citizen Reporting
By the mid-1990s, the Internet and other new communication technologies had created new opportunities for citizens
to function as reporters. Blogs, web sites, electronic bulletin boards, and mobile camera phones with wireless access
functions gave many citizens the ability to present different perspectives on the news that conventional news media
often failed to cover. Citizens could now share news and
information about current issues and common interests and
also deliver information to other audiences in ways that led
to online discussions among individuals.
CompuServe started to provide online services such as
electronic mail services and real-time chatting in 1979, but
few people received benefits from those services, including
people in business, academia, government, and the military. During the late 1980s, when CompuServe and AOL
started to offer online services to the general public, ordinary citizens began to have the means to create and deliver
their text messages, photographs, and videos to other audiences. Thanks to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), online users began to generate documents that could be
hyperlinked without any space constraint.
Citizen reporters gradually adopted Weblogs as a new
reporting tool in the mid-1990s. As Weblogs became popular, citizens could more easily and conveniently produce
a wide range of news and information through their blog
spheres. Citizen reporters gained popularity through OhMyNews.com, an online based Korean news site. With the
motto “every citizen is a reporter,” OhMyNews, an alternative newspaper, launched their web site on February 22,
2000, and successfully conducted citizen journalism in collaboration with professional journalists.
Types of Citizen Reporters
Citizen reporters produced and delivered news and information in various forms, such as text, video, and photos,
through diverse communication tools, which included mailing lists, online forums, Weblogs, Wiki, mobile phone cameras, and Internet video and radio broadcastings. Up to the
mid-1990s, before Weblogs became popular, Usenet, email
lists, and electronic Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were
the most widely available communication tools in which
citizens could exchange feedback and comments on messages and contents they produced. As citizens started to use
Weblog in the late 1990s, bloggers significantly increased
the number of citizen reporters.
Some citizen reporters merely posted or added their
comments to various news sites written by professional
journalists, such as the New York Times, Washington Post,
CNN, and local mainstream news sites. In addition to posting or adding comments on news sites, citizen reporters
created and produced news with professional journalists
through bloghouses, such as BlufftonToday.com, Lawrence.com, The Denver Post.com, and NJ.com, among others. Finally, citizen reporters participated in news making
processes through major news organizations’ web sites.
For example, MSNBC hired citizen reporters and opened
a web site for them when the Katrina disaster occurred
in August 2005. Through the web site, citizen reporters
posted various news and information about Katrina and
its related issues in diverse forms such as text, video, and
photographs.
Citizen reporters actively engaged in citizen-based news
sites. For example, citizen journalists worked for citizen
media, such as MyMissourian.com, WestportNow, iBrattleboro.com, Backfence.com, GetLocalNews.com, and
DailyHeights.com. Some citizen news sites published their
news and information written by citizen reporters in an
offline version, including The Northwest Voice, MyTown,
Neighbors, YourHub, and Bluffton Today. Similarly, citizen
reporters freely created and edited Web contents through
so-called Wiki Journalism. In Wiki Journalism, readers
could be both news creators and editors. For example, any
citizen could generate or add content to WikiNews, a free
online news source, to Backfence.com, a hyperlocal news
site, and to Slashdot.org, a technology related news site.
Citizen reporters frequently collaborated with professional journalists to produce news under one umbrella, such
as OhMyNews and BlufftonToday. In the case of OhMyNews, in 2006, about fifty professional journalists wrote
news articles and columns, whereas about forty-one thousand citizen reporters contributed news articles on a wide
range of topics. Citizen reporters also exchanged their news
contents with professional journalists in conventional news
media. After trained citizen journalists produced news on
independent citizen media sites, local mainstream news
media produced news articles written by citizen reporters.
Also, citizen web sites produced news articles written by
professional journalists. Madison Commons, founded in
fall, 2005, collaborated with the Capital Times, Wisconsin
State Journal, and the Isthmus in Madison, Wisconsin. In
January 2006, the Madison Commons Project launched one
of the first citizen-based journalism news sites (madisoncommons.org) where citizen reporters posted investigative
reports about the Madison community. Once a week, such
mainstream newspapers as the Capital Times, republished
news articles written by citizen reporters.
Recent History of Citizen Reporting
During the early twenty-first century, citizen reporters were
increasingly going global. They created and disseminated
material that because of Web technologies knew no geographic boundaries. As their audiences were worldwide,
many of them came to think of themselves as global citizen
reporters. For example, Global Voices (GlobalVoices.org)
was founded in 2004 with the purpose of building a global
network for citizen reporters or bloggers. It was maintained
by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University’s Law School. In addition, in 2005, OhMyNews hosted OhMyNews International (OMNI) Citizen
Reporters’ Forum for citizen reporters who were working
nationally and internationally. OhMyNews hosted second
International Citizen Reporters’ Forum in 2006.
Although citizen reporters often claimed they worked
as journalists, many had not been trained as journalists.
They had little exposure to the traditional norms of objectivity, fairness, balance, and neutrality that have long been
a part of a journalist’s professional preparation. Citizen
reporters can already claim a unique and growing prominence in gathering and disseminating news and, as a consequence, influenced the way journalism was practiced in
the twenty-first century and the increasingly democratic,
digital marketplace in which news was developed and
exchanged.