Produsage: The Rise of the Citizen Journalist

Produsage is a merging of the words “production" and "usage", popularised by Australian media scholar Axel Bruns. Produsage refers to the type of user-led content creation that takes place in a variety of online environments such as Wikipedia, open source software and blogosphere. The concept blurs the boundaries between passive consumption and active production. A number of key domains are currently driving the development of user-led online environments, including the rise of citizen journalism (Bruns, 2007).

Bowman and Willis define citizen journalism as ‘the act of a citizen, or a group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing and disseminating news and information’ (2003, p. 9). In today’s information society the same resources that are available to journalist are also available to anyone with a computer and internet access. Many reporters work with pocket-sized cameras and edit their stories using desktop software. With these tools available to the general public, citizen journalist are just as capable of producing multimedia stories.

Why the need for citizen journalism when we have professional journalists?

In 2006 the Howard government of Australia repealed cross and foreign ownership restrictions that had been in place in since 1987. This signalled a new era of media concentration and further reduction of diversity in opinions covered in traditional media (Nightingale and Dwyer, 2007). Therefore citizen journalism emerged largely in repose to shortcomings in the professional journalistic field who were influenced by the personal interests of their owners. The intent is to ‘provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires’ (Bowman & Willis, 2003, p. 9). Gillmor (2006, p. xxiv) iterates this point further:

The lines will blur between producers and consumers… The communication network itself will become a medium for everyone’s voice, not just the few who can afford to buy multimillion-dollar printing presses, launch satellites or win the government’s permission to squat on the public’s airwaves.

Audiences themselves decide what stories are made and how they are told. This increases the possibility that stories which question the established interests may gain currency and result in destabilising social or political action. New media equips the public with an arena to create and share ideas, views of the world and unique personal experiences.

While the effect of citizen journalism is still taking its toll on the communications industry there is some opposition to its worth. James Farmer, blogger for The Age argues that the concept of citizen journalism, or a person’s capacity to put anything they want on the web, is being confused with journalism which is a profession and ‘provides the quality and breadth of content that keeps an enormous number of readers coming back for more’ (2006). Meehan agrees acknowledging that citizen journalists are less likely to find success compared to professional journalists as they lack a knowledge of the industry and good contacts (2001, p. 103).

Another issue is information overload. With so much information being published on the internet it can be hard for audiences to sift through all the information and gain credible and reliable sources. Many users will be inclined to read traditional media publications online to avoid searching.

For a better understanding of citizen journalism take a look at the following successful online publications:

1.      South Korean ‘OhMyNews’

Established in 2000 with the slogan ‘every citizen is a reporter’. Only 20% of its online content is from its employed staff with the rest coming from an estimated 50,000 South Koreans who post stories to the site (Flew, 2008).

One contributor for OhMyNews stated that ‘the greatest beauty of citizen journalism is that the centre of power is in every citizen’s hands’ (Birieasha, 2007, cited in Nightingale & Dwyer, 2007).

(Source: http://img.timeinc.net/time/50coolestweb/websites/ohmy_news.jpg)

 

2.      Malaysiakini.com

Established in 1999 to ‘use the internet to provide free and fair news to the Malaysian public and to set new standards in journalism as well as to support the development of freedom of speech, social justice, and democracy in Malaysia. (Malaysiakini, 2007).

http://blog.winterwong.com/wpcontent/uploads/2011/10/20111003_malaysiakini.jpg

 

References

Bowman, S and Willis, C 2003, WeMedia: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information, The Media Centre, American Press Institute, July.

Bruns, A 2007, 'Produsage: towards a broader framework for user-led content creation', in Creativity and cognition: proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on creativity & cognition, accessed 12 January 2014, <http://ezproxy.lib.swin.edu.au/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1254960.1254975>.

Farmer, J 2006, ‘Citizen Journalism Sucks’, The Age, posted 5 October 2006, viewed 28 January 2014, <blogs.theage.com.au/media/archives/2006/10/citizen_journal.html>.

Flew, T 2008, New media: an introduction, 3rd edn, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, Australia.

Gillmor, D 2006, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, O’Reilly, Sebastopol CA.

Malaysiakini 2007, ‘About Malaysiakini.com’, accessed 2 February 2014, <www.malaysiakini.com/pages/general/>.

Meehan, K 2001, ‘It's the hard life for freelancers’, Australian Journalism Review, Vol. 23 (1), July 2001, p. 99-109

Nightingale, V and Dwyer, T 2007 New Media Worlds: challenges for convergence, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, Australia.