Social news, citizen journalism and democracy

This article aims to contribute to a critical research agenda for investigating the democratic implications of citizen journalism and social news. The article calls for a broad conception of ‘citizen journalism’ which is (1) not an exclusively online phenomenon, (2) not confined to explicitly ‘alternative’ news sources, and (3) includes ‘metajournalism’ as well as the practices of journalism itself. A case is made for seeing democratic implications not simply in the horizontal or ‘peer-to-peer’ public sphere of citizen journalism networks, but also in the possibility of a more ‘reflexive’ culture of news consumption through citizen participation. The article calls for a research agenda that investigates new forms of gatekeeping and agenda-setting power within social news and citizen journalism networks and, drawing on the example of three sites, highlights the importance of both formal and informal status differentials and of the software ‘code’ structuring these new modes of news production.