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The theme at this year’s AEJMC annual conference is transformation, taking account of the changes taking place in the media.

While many panels look at specific issues such as blogging and multimedia journalism, a paper by David Ryfe and Donica Mensing at the University of Nevada in Reno suggests that the purpose of journalism may be changing, with participation becoming increasingly important.

They asked whether journalism is shifting from information transmission to something else. They point to how journalism has changed in the past – in the 1830s from journalism of affliation one of association, largely to political parties, and in the 1890s from one of association to journalism of information, designed to tell citizens about the world around them)

This way of looking at journalism is well entrenched, with virtually all journalists seeing their role as providing citizens with the information they need to make decisions in a democratic society.

Ryfe and Mensing looked at citizen journalism sites to find out if they saw this as their role, or if they were trying to do something else. What was interesting was that most sites still saw an important role for the transmission of information.  Sites tended to define themselves as providing information primarily to their local community.

But they also found that these sites were trying to go beyond mere transmission and also stressed the role of participation.  The citizen journalism sites in the US they looked at placed a premium on conversation and discussion.

The researchers concluded that citizen journalism sites had a much more active view of users, not just consuming but producing information. So citizens become informed not just by consuming information, but by interacting with others around the information.

This suggests that journalism may be moving away from an expert-driven information system to a journalism of participation.  Clearly participation is becoming part of the discussion around journalism, and most mainstream media outlets are exploring this area.

The question is what do we mean by participation. Most news outlets tend to view this as allowing people to comment, so participation comes at the end of the journalistic process. What would be more transformative is a way of involving people in the various stages of the journalistic process, from story selection to production and publication.

This is what sets apart citizen journalism sites from the mainstream media and perhaps this is why we may be seeing a new conception of journalism emerging in this space.

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