Conversation through journalism: Searching for organizing principles of public and citizen journalism

Abstract

This article reviews the public and citizen journalism movements of recent years and offers some perspectives on how the current and future journalism can function to benefit democratic public life. A major argument of this article is that ‘conversation’ defines news as a process of negotiated social meaning and that it should be the organizing principle of today’s journalism. It is also argued that traditional journalistic principles such as objectivity and distance may no longer be useful to today’s citizen journalism and that we see a rise of new journalistic principles such as interactivity and transparency. Finally, borrowing from deliberative democracy literature, a bottom-up flow model to connect citizen and public journalism is discussed.