Impact of Citizen Journalism on Traditional Media
Traditional media have dominated the public sphere for the last century. Now, user-generated content has emerged as a competitor to the status quo of legacy media corporations. Des Freedman outlines media power as a relationship between different interests, engaged in struggles for a range of objectives that include; legitimation, influence, control, status, and increasingly, profit. The gravitation of content to cyberspace has meant the possibility for a plurality of voices in a new public sphere, an opportunity for every voice to be heard, and a new global network. The media traditionally leverage symbolic power, through their position as both producers and sharers of symbolic content, creating one or multiple narratives that then contribute to the structuration of society. Drawing upon the works of Curran, Fenton, Manning White, Schudson and Goode, the complex relationship between social media and legacy media often leads to more questions than conclusions.
When looking at power relations between legacy media and the rise of user-generated content via the internet, there are three main approaches which can be considered. The first is the gatekeeper approach. Manning-White conceptualised the traditional media as gatekeepers, suggesting a selective editorial process where the institution or the individual editor decides what is newsworthy. At all levels of this process, individuals within the media institution decide what news stories to include and what stories to exclude. These decisions are based not only on news values but also on the editor's personal experiences and expectations. The promise of the internet was a freer more transparent press with social media offering the means for citizens to actively engage and learn about the issues which directly affect them, without intermediaries like legacy media corporations selecting what stories are brought to their attention.
In the 1990’s, it was a commonly held belief that through technological determinism, the internet would disrupt corporate media relationships, undermine established economics of the media industry and result in greater diversity. Through disintermediation small companies would be able to compete with the larger companies and the distribution of wealth and power would become horizontal rather than vertical. Citizens would be better informed due to an increase in diversity of news sources, and through multiplicity, there would no longer be a reliance on institutional filtering such as gatekeeping.
One example of where social media can be seen to break down traditional power relations is citizen journalism. With mainstream news, there is no capacity to question the selection process of the “gatekeepers” of media corporations. In the emerging, digitally-based system, news consumers have more choice, readers have the ability to respond critically to news coverage or to initiate their own individual or group journalism. The relationship between sources, media professionals and readers becomes more complex and less manageable for gatekeepers. Citizen journalism can force the traditional mainstream media to cover a topic and allow citizens more agency in the agenda-setting process. Such as the Arab Spring movement in 2010.
However while Manning White’s idea of the gatekeeper is based around traditional media, his core ideas are applicable to the user-generated world. This ties into the second approach to analysing power relations, political economy. Venture capital, larger scale corporations, advertising revenue, and commercialism are shaping the citizen journalism environment in a similar way to how they shape traditional media. The political economy of citizen journalism is on par with large scale traditional media corporations and advertising revenue is becoming increasingly more prevalent. On the surface citizen journalism appears to redistribute power from a “top-down” perspective to a more horizontal system, where citizens can engage in new aspects of news making and radicalise the public sphere. In reality citizen journalism is susceptible to the traditional power system of mainstream media. Platforms, where many citizen journalisms exists, are run by large corporations such as Google and Facebook and these companies strongly mediate the cultural expressions of Internet users. They impose their own regimes of visibility which do not give prominence to alternative news sites.
Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model offers a way to explain the complex links between media owners and their readership. They identify five sets of forces at play in serving the established power; the size of ownership, reliance on advertising revenue, the sourcing of mass media, flak, and anti-communism. The internet has undermined legacy news organisations for advertising revenue. With less revenue for traditional organisations, this has resulted in convergence. Although legacy media organisations have been able to entrench their dominant position on the internet they are also experiencing budget cuts as more and more advertisers turn to the alternative sources. Fewer journalists are producing more content, resulting in an increased reliance on official sources like political elites, mimicking the third filter of the propaganda model. This creates a dependent symbiotic relationship with powerful sources and damages the perceived neutrality of traditional media. However, the internet is still dominated by legacy media organisations, as they have the revenue to develop their social media platforms and online presence. Mainstream news attracts the most traffic as “digitally connected citizens prefer the websites of major media organisations or television for information on public affairs over internet-based news organisations” Fenton’s idea of polycentrality; the notion that power is spread more widely in an environment where anyone can set up a website, can be challenged on the grounds that social and political elites have greater cultural and economic capital at their disposal to harness the power of social media to their advantage.
In broad terms, citizen journalism can be said to feed the ‘democratic imagination’, entirely because it stimulates the potential for journalism to become part of a conversation – something that resonates with the ideals of Jurgen Habermas’ public sphere. Much of the conversation generated within the sphere of citizen journalism is horizontal instead of vertical or “top down”. “The re-balancing of “top-down, one-way communication, away from powerful mainstream media and toward the public was the promise the internet held with the inception of Web 2.0.”. But there is also a need to acknowledge the many threads of communication that run vertically within this sphere: professionals, elites, power-holders, and experts still contribute and consume off the conversations and discussions held on public platforms. O’Sullivan states that the citizen journalism movement does not signal the end of agenda-setting by professional or elite media organizations, as these institutions still break and frame a large proportion of the news stories we interact with online. The change, user-generated content has fostered however, is that now traditional legacy media must compete for our attention with a diverse range of alternative news sources.
The sociological approach offers a final way to attempt to break down the power struggle between legacy media and social media. Molotch and Lester theorise that three sets of actors are involved in the generation of public events; promoters, assemblers, and consumers. Through the interplay of these sets of actors, reality is constructed for us through mediated representations and as such traditional journalism reflects only journalistic practices. Early sociology of news work perceived journalism as rational: top-down, involving media routines and institutional, and influenced by social and cultural factors. The news was understood to be a self-contained profession that was influenced by internal and external forces, and there was little acknowledgment of human agency amongst news workers. Regardless of journalists own journalistic preferences they are socialised into the daily rituals of journalism, as Epstein describes it, the creation of news stories are the social manufacture of an organisational product. Members of traditional media organisations modify their own personal values in accordance with the values of the organisation. Through the construction of news as discussed by Molotch and Lester, legacy media can create their own narratives which then shape society’s values and beliefs. Pierre Bourdieu, a structural sociologist, argues that this is where symbolic power lies, in the ability to construct a social reality that is then legitimised by its audience. Through the traditional media’s ability to freely produce and disseminate symbolic content to large audiences, using both traditional and digital broadcasting devices, they, therefore, contribute to the shaping of social reality more than any other social actor.
Nevertheless, the rise of user-generated content offers the potential to overcome this social organisation of news work, with alternative possibilities for news construction. Live blogging combines aspects of social media with core journalistic practices like live news reporting. It is a freer more transparent style of journalism that moves beyond the inverted pyramid structure of typical news stories, it also operates on a 24/7 schedule so the the typical routine of media corporations does not influence the reporter. More recently, emergent news values and actors such as coders, internet intermediaries, web programmers, ordinary citizens, and amateur journalists are reordering news production. Values and practices associated with these new online social actors such as efficiency, immediacy, interactivity, and audience engagement, play a role in enhancing tensions in networked journalistic practices and norms. This development implies a transition from the traditional understanding of news work as situated in newsrooms, and taking a broader view to encompass the changing and networked political economy, culture, and practices in the sociology of news work.
However, ultimately, global internet access hinders any potential redistribution of power. Economic inequality means that the privileged are the most active in this post-internet era. This undermines the aforementioned “promise of the internet”, as it essentially only widens the gap and power imbalance between the poor and the elite. Furthermore, this economic inequality depresses interest in politics with the exception of the affluent.
Previously, while in the mass-media dominated era it was only the top parties that received attention by the press and television but now social media makes sure that all political actors can be represented online, offering a platform for them to present their ideas, policies, and manifestos. Party websites can function as a channel for political participation by facilitating interactive linkages between citizens and parties. This allows for direct communication that was almost impossible in the mass media era, allowing citizens to directly question politicians on matters of interest. In this manner, social media takes over the role of the public sphere as a space for communication, deliberation and communal thinking, and democratising politics. Siapera argues that social media enables direct political action, bypassing traditional political institutions and legacy media and changing the face of protest and activism. Despite this transformation of the political and public sphere, it lacks potential due to the fact that only 51% of the world’s population is online. The agency Siapera describes remains in the hands of those who can afford the luxury of the internet. The internet, therefore, does not rejuvenate democracy, as alienation from the political process limits the internet’s emancipatory potential.
Despite the emergence of “high-profile phenomena such as interactivity, citizen journalism, blogs, social media and various forms of user-generated content”, which feed idealised notions of a reformed public sphere and the democratic imagination, journalism largely has not been deepened, expanded, or otherwise transformatively enriched by the Internet. There is no questioning that the creation of new technologies which allow for user-generated content has connected individuals and allowed for participation within the media. Traditional legacy media can no longer be seen as one large overarching sphere of power, however, the potential for social media to level the power dynamics is minimal. As alluded to by Herman and Chomsky in their propaganda model, media corporations have a symbiotic relationship with other powers in society. With this in mind, it is doubtful that society as a whole will allow for any significant change in power dynamics, in terms of ownership, the elite will always ensure to maintain the status quo. On top of this, more often than not the users of social media are bystanders rather than participants in discussions, and are more concerned about the presentation of self than changing power relations. Social media, in other words, are shaped by the wider environment in which they are situated rather than functioning as an autonomous force transforming society.
